How to import .ods?

Question 1

I wrote a package called readODS which has a function read.ods that returns ods files as data.frames (a list of data.frames, one per sheet)

It is available on CRAN, see here!

Source and bug reports here: https://github.com/chainsawriot/readODS

Question 2

I had the exact problem on Ubuntu Linux. It's frustratingly obvious:

sudo apt-get install gnumeric

As it happens, I had a bunch of obsolete packages, and went thru a bunch to update them. The gnumeric library requires the XML library, and my installation of XML library was built on 2.14, and my R wouldn't load anything built before 3.0. I don't think that is your issue, but if this solution above doesn't work, maybe you could also check that your packages are up-to-date. Anything I installed via sudo had to be removed via sudo, or I got permissions errors.

It's frustratingly obvious, because the error message is

Error in read.gnumeric.sheet(file = fname, head = TRUE, sheet.name = "Sheet1") : Required program 'ssconvert' not found.

To emphasize it, the package documentation at http://cran.at.r-project.org/web/packages/gnumeric/gnumeric.pdf says

Requires an external program, 'ssconvert' (normally installed with 'gnumeric' (http://projects.gnome.org/gnumeric/) in 'PATH'.

How do you get ssconvert? Again, frustratingly obvious: it's normally installed with gnumeric. Go to the command line, and type ssconvert, and it'll remind you that:

user@Computer:~$ ssconvert
The program 'ssconvert' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing: sudo apt-get install gnumeric

I checked, ssconvert isn't in the dependency packages (like gnumeric-common), it's in gnumeric proper, so you have to install the complete gnumeric package:

sudo apt-get install gnumeric

Question 3

I haven't tried it but the ROpenOffice package looks like it might do the job: http://www.omegahat.org/ROpenOffice/