I can view changes via Edit>Track Changes>Manage. But how can I copy or export this (as plain text would be good).
No such thing. However, if you unzip the document then in content.xml is the <table:tracked-changes> element that lists the changes.
Thank you. I did that, but the file is pretty large before unzipping (1,490 KB), so the contents.xml turned out to be 46,000 KB! which won’t open. I did take a look at a smaller file and realized there is not a “user friendly” list of edits under table:tracked-changes, but rather a bunch of xml coding that describes the previous values of each edit, while the current values are separately described in another element (for Sheet1 here) <table:table table:name=“Sheet1” table:style-name=“ta1”>. So if I’m correct, I’d have to build some sort of program to turn this information into a nice table. Just making sure I’ve got this right for myself and any others who might come looking for the same thing. Thanks!
Well yes, of course the change-tracking contains all actions and their dependencies, otherwise reconstructing content and discarding subsequent depending actions when a change was rejected would not be possible, and it does not duplicate the current cell content (only intermediary content if a cell was changed more than once) so if you need that you will have to reconstruct it just like the Calc application does when loading a document.
To obtain content of XML and work with it there exists a plethora of tools. Simply extracting the change-tracking from a large file like your’s would be possible with, for example,
unzip filename.ods content.xml
xmlstarlet sel -t -c '/office:document-content/office:body/office:spreadsheet/table:tracked-changes' content.xml >change-track.xml
xmllint --format change-track.xml >pretty.xml
where xmlstarlet copies the entire given xpath’s element and xmllint just pretty-prints the extracted content.
I’m looking into that, thank you!