On Tue, 21 Apr 2009 22:11:01 -0700, JIREH
wrote:

I am trying to open an ods file in excel. how can i do this?


MS Office is not co-compatible with all other "office suite" products
in the computing realm, despite some of them feeling the need to be able
to open an MS office suite generated file, even though most do so very
poorly.

You need to open the file in whatever app it was made in, and then see
if that app has an export function to generate a compatible file.