I have been using LibreOffice Calc for many years. I have run into a problem when trying to open an old spreadsheet. Calc saves the file as myworkbook.ods but after about 2 years the system seems to rename the file to myworkbook-ods.axx I’ve looked up the axx extension and have learned it’s for AxCrypt. I don’t have AxCrypt on my system.
Does anyone know what’s going on? I need to open some old spreadsheets but the files seem encrypted.
1 Like
Not me.
The spreadsheets that you can open, are they password protected against viewing? (i.e. encrypted)
A normal .ods file, whether encrypted or not, starts with “PK”. So if you type at the shell prompt
view
:noau r foo.ods
:q!
where foo.ods is your spreadsheet, you will see “PK” as the first two characters and the rest will be mostly gobbledygook but that’s OK although you can also see application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet nearby, and
where the :q! is what you need to type in order to exit the program.
What do you see when you do the same with a -ods.axx file?
1 Like
When I type view, I get "Could not find the database of available applications, run update-command-not-found as root to fix this. It doesn’t fix it!
The ods.axx file is encrypted though. I just don’t know how it got that way. I just thought someone might know why older files are being encrypted and how.
1 Like
If you don’t have the view command then just use vi. Either way, make sure not to edit or otherwise change the file. You just want to look at it to see whether the first piece of the file will give clues as to what it actually is.
It can sometimes be useful to do file foo where foo is your filename. The file command attempts to determine what a file actually is.
1 Like