Posts tagged: tidyods

At some point I’ll probably get round to putting {tidyods} and {shrthnd} on CRAN, but in the meantime I’ve set up a repository on R-universe that hosts these two packages.

About a year ago I started development of a new R package to deal with dirty data, specifically to process the use of shorthand, symbols and other annotations in columns of spreadsheets and tables. I realised I’ve not blogged about it, and thus if one subscribes to “blog-driven-development”¹ then if I’ve not blogged about it the package doesn’t exist.

Last summer I started the development of {tidyods}, an R package for reading cells in ODS (OpenDocument Spreadsheet) files, and effectively a {tidyxl} equivalent for ODS files. After developing the first iteration of the package in June I left it alone, but I’ve recently revisited the package and refactored the code which has improved performance.

TLDR: For very good reasons ODS is a horrible data file format. The OpenDocument Spreadsheet (ODS) format is an increasingly common format for publishing spreadsheets, especially official statistics from UK government departments. I recently encountered a problem when trying to use the {readODS} package to read a published ODS file. More surprsingly, I discovered that {readODS} is the only R package on CRAN for working with ODS files. As a result I’ve started to develop my own package, {tidyods}.