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This is probably described elsewhere in better detail, but one of the things I've been intensely frustrated with Word/Excel/PowerPoint is how you cannot open up their supposed "Open XML" format and get anything remotely readable. It's not a clear format:
In searching for alternatives (outside of HTML) LibreOffice seemed like the best route but I couldn't seem to get inside a LibreOffice ODT file and make changes either, so I did some digging. It turns out, if you want to modify Open Doc XML files, it's easy to do.
Why would you modify LibreOffice internal content?
You can do a variety of batch operations to change formatting, content, and other complex operations via things like regular expressions find/replace. Even if you don't work in that file format, a lot of edits and changes are very easy to export to Word, Google Docs, HTML and a dozen other formats.
Steps:
- Copy your ODS (spreadsheet) file to a separate file called OUTPUT.ODS.ZIP
- Using a compression tool like 7zip, open the OUTPUT.ODS.ZIP and delete everything except for the file "mimetype"
- Extract the original ODS file to a folder and make whatever changes are needed to the various files inside (batch changes, , etc.)
- Using 7zip, copy contents of that folder back into the OUTPUT.ODS.ZIP
- Rename OUTPUT.ODS and launch
If that seems tedious, it's because the mimetype file needs to remain uncompressed, and is there to help it make it easier to detect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocum ... cification
And of course a CLI method is available to enable batch operations:
https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question ... ment-file/