Differences and similarities between ODS and XLSX

ODS and XLSX are office document formats. They are widely popular and are used to store rich text documents. We will review similarities and differences of ODS and XLSX below:

ODS: It is based on XML and is used to create office spreadsheets of several types, making it a multipurpose format. ODS files are part of the LibreOffice program created by The Document Foundation which is an alternative to Microsoft Office, since it is possible to download it for free without paying for licenses. By saving them properly, ODS files can be opened with Microsoft Excel and easily converted to XLSX files. Similarly, LibreOffice can open Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, which means a high compatibility between these formats. As mentioned earlier, ODS files are built with numerous components, including scalable vector graphics and multimedia integration language.

XLSX: Like spreadsheets with the XLS extension, XLSX files are Microsoft Excel calc and spreadsheets files too. With the release of the 2007 version of Excel, the format was introduced as a new standard for spreadsheets and calculation documents. The goal was to establish an XML-based file format that required less storage capacity. The name XLSX is a combination of the well-known XLS extension and the X for XML. Unlike the XLS file, the XLSX format is not extensible, but contains a set of packages of less than 10 kB in size each, being more practical to archive, as it can be decompressed with software external to Office Suite and allows easy sending by mail electronic.

Both types of files, actually, are compressed files with a series of XML documents that serve to configure some aspects of the original document, therefore their conversion from one format to another (ODS to XLSX and XLSX to ODS) is simple and can be done, either with Microsoft Office Excel software, with LibreOffice suite, also available for Microsoft Windows, as with any online system, among them we can mention:

OnlineConvert
Zamzar
Convertio

The procedure to convert ODS to XLSX or XSLX to ODS is standard for any of the online services above: