It is little depressive, but it seems to me that there is much more support for manipulating ugly proprietary closed format like xls in rails (and ruby) in general that to documented open Open Document format. Why it is so? (I know it is kind of philosiophical, but I just do not get the fact, that the opensource is not more inclined to write SW for open formats).
For example for ruby there is a spreadsheet gem.
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Your question is tied to “Why do corporations/people use commercial suites/applications when equally good open source versions are available?”
Answer that and you’ll have a good idea why there is less ODS support than XLS. For now, here’s a hint: People do what their management asks.
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Supply and demand.
Manipulating Excel spreadsheets is a task which is extremely useful to many people, hence there is considerable demand for code that does this, hence that code exists.
Manipulating ODS spreadsheets is useful only to a very tiny niche, hence there is minimal demand for code that does this, hence nobody has bothered to expend much effort writing that code.
If ODS ever becomes more than, say, 0.1% as widely used as XLS spreadsheets, this situation may change.
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