From 0c536da5ff5c90e7efb04c381a723fa1f6c6767c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Henning Thielemann Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2024 19:50:20 +0200 Subject: [PATCH] doc: hledger.m4.md: FODS output - describe the advantages over CSV --- hledger/hledger.m4.md | 17 +++++++++++++++-- 1 file changed, 15 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/hledger/hledger.m4.md b/hledger/hledger.m4.md index ab67b4dd5..3f8e98e3d 100644 --- a/hledger/hledger.m4.md +++ b/hledger/hledger.m4.md @@ -794,8 +794,21 @@ are disabled automatically. ### FODS output -[FODS] is the OpenDocument spreadsheet format used by LibreOffice and OpenOffice. -It is a good format to use if you are exporting to their spreadsheet app. +[FODS] is the OpenDocument Spreadsheet format as plain XML, +as accepted by LibreOffice and OpenOffice. +If you use their spreadsheet applications, +this is better than CSV because it works across locales +(decimal point vs. decimal comma, +character encoding stored in XML header, thus no problems with umlauts), +it supports fixed header rows and columns, +cell types (string vs. number vs. date), +separation of number and currency +(currency is displayed but the cell type +is still a number accessible for computation), +styles (bold), borders. +Btw. you can still extract CSV from FODS/ODS +using various utilities like `libreoffice --headless` or +[ods2csv](https://hackage.haskell.org/package/ods2csv). [FODS]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument