Hi Shirley;
PB can easily read any binary file via its FileOpen () & FileReadEx ( ) commands. The real issue is understanding the data stream and then its representation - to which, PB would have no idea about an Excel or Open Office document equivalent formats.
Saying that, the key to visually rendering any binary data l(ike a spreadsheet) would be to have a 3rd party control that the PB app could call & feed in the binary data in order to render it. For example (just Googling around a little ...
https://www.spreadsheetgear.com/?aw=excel+control
https://www.edrawsoft.com/office-ocx.php
Of course, why not just have the spreadsheet rendered something "generic" like a in PDF format?
HTH
Regards ... Chris
I think the original poster wants to open the files to read the data from cells, not render it on screen.
ODS files are compressed in ZIP format. They contain multiple files (metadata, styles, a thumbnails in png format, content, and a few others). This means that opening and reading data requires zip file extraction, and xml parsing.
The data is in content.xml, but rows/columns are not explicitly named, so the only way to find cell C13 would be to load all of the data into a grid, and see what's there. I've looked around on the web a bit and didn't see any COM objects or DLLs that allow this access. Plenty of Python/Java/PHP scripts out there though.
The only way I can see to accomplish this would be to use a ZIP library to extract the content.xml file, and parse that with the PB XML parsing object.