Why and how the OpenDocument format can save you a lot of time!

I'll be supporting .fods (the flat xml spreadsheet version) in my next release of the 4tH compiler. However, it is not that easy to find any documentation or tutorial on it. As a matter of fact, I kind of re-engineered it by dumping a file on disk and removing lines until I got something that was still readable.

I am by no means a fan of MS, but it was quite easy to find an article on their Excel XML format (Wikipedia). If people want more support for their stuff, DOCUMENT IT! Not just a dump of the entire standard, but also a tiny tutorial, starting with a minimal version and then expand it.

Another irritation: .fods is for some obscure reason not supported on Windows, so I had to Google for the solution, which I found in some obscure forum entry. Then it works flawlessly, WT*??

Bottom line: we developers cannot support your formats if you don't make them accessible for us.

I'm curious. Why fods instead of regular ods? Or are you already supporting regular ods?

Also, I must say that I have read the complete ODF spec several times. It's not hard to read nand at 600 pages quite managable. Unlike the OOXML spec. I've built ODF-XSLT from reading the spec.

Easy, I don't have to do the whole ZIP stuff or multiple files in order to get a readable file. Flat ASCII. That's why I love LaTeX, Postscript or LyX.