Peppermint 9. What is the significance and purpose of file suffices “.ods” and “.odt”
These are the suffices used by the LibreOffice & OpenOffice software. The “od” bit represents "open document format, which is becoming so ubiquitous that even Microft Office will read it. “ods” refers to Open Document (format) Spreadsheet, and “odt” to Open Document (format) Text document.
When using LibreOffice you can save a document/spreadsheet in Microsoft *.doc format if you wish but there is no advantage, and LibreOffice will open *.doc documents.
In fact Linux has no use for suffices as it looks at the file contents to determine what it is and opens the right application. But people sometimes find it convenient: for example if you click on a text file it will open in LibreOffice although “gedit” (a simple text editor) might be more appropriate. And if you save a temporary backup copy of a file you can add a “.bak” suffix to remind you.
Hope that helps. come back if you need more info.
Keith
I don’t know what you get in Peppermint, but some file managers are quite clever — if the format doesn’t match the suffix, they’ll tell you and ask what to do with it when you click on it. The file types are identified by their magic number:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_format#Magic_number
May thanks Keith & David