OpenDocument Format (OASIS ODF and ISO/IEC 26300:2006)

The OpenOffice.org XML file format is zip archive including several components all of which are text files, most of these with markup in the eXtensible Markup Language (XML).

Gnumeric reads version 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2 of ODF spreadsheet files and writes version 1.2 files with or without foreign elements. Foreign elements are an extension mechanism defined in ODF and allow features to be saved in ODF files that are not specifically standardized by ODF. Gnumeric plans to continue to support this format in the future.

Name: Open Document Format, ODF
Extensions: .ods
Compatible Programs: OpenOffice.org Calc, LibreOffice Calc, KSpread, StarCalc
Open / Save: Both
Limitations

Plugin

Supported by the 'Open Document Format' plugin.

Format Details

The file format is a zip archive containing several text and XML elements: a mimetype file giving the mime type, a content.xml file with the contents of the spreadsheet cells, and several other files with meta data, style definitions or information on the settings. The file contents can be extracted with the unzip command line program or with any of a number of graphical interface programs.

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) has accepted this file format as the standard "OASIS Open Office XML Format". The published specification for the file format is available from the OASIS Open Office XML Format Technical Committee web page. Other information is available from the OpenOffice.org XML File Format web page, part of the OpenOffice.org project.

Version 1.0 of ODF was adopted as an international standard by ISO/IEC as ISO/IEC 26300:2006.

Further Processing

Files in this format can be imported and modified by many different programs including the OpenOffice.org Calc and LibreOffice Calc spreadsheets or may be modified through XML processing.