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}.