ODSCharts creates Opendocument spreadsheets (*.ods files) with scatter charts that Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice or OpenOffice can open and manipulate.

See the Code at: https://github.com/sonofeft/ODSCharts

See the Docs at: http://odscharts.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

See PyPI page at:https://pypi.python.org/pypi/odscharts

ODSCharts will create ods files readable by Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice or OpenOffice.

The format is a very narrow subset of full spreadsheet support. There is no attempt to supply a full API interface:

#. All sheets contain either a table of numbers or a chart object
    - A table of numbers: 
        - starts at "A1"
        - row 1 is labels
        - row 2 is units
        - row 3 through N is float or string entries
    - Chart objects are scatter plots
        - Each series is a column from a table
        - Each x axis is a column from a table

Click images to see full size

• Matplotlib is very good when you want to publish a chart without the data.
• Spreadsheets are very good when you want to publish both the chart and the data.
• Python is a great general-purpose programming language for science and engineering
• Therefore the world needs a cross-platform, open-source, python solution to generate cross-platform, open-source spreadsheet files.

• *.ods files are cross-platform, open-source spreadsheet files.
• LibreOffice and OpenOffice read *.ods files created by Excel much better than Excel reads *.ods files created by LibreOffice or OpenOffice.
• Excel *.ods files are more simple than LibreOffice or OpenOffice *.ods files (Excel only partially supports ods)
• It's easy to reverse-engineer Excel-generated *.ods files as cross-platform, open-source spreadsheet files.
• ODSCharts generates *.ods files by reverse-engineering *.ods files created by Excel.

That's It... That's how and why ODSCharts was created.