Support at least one binary open standard out of the box

[chainsawriot]

Except those plain text formats, all binary formats supported by this package out of the box are proprietary formats (Excel, SAS, Stata, SPSS), provided by openxlsx, haven, and readxl. These formats are popular and I support that they should remain the default. However, a proposal is to support at least one open binary format, which is 3 vs 1. I believe it's fairer. It also allows one to convert proprietary formats to a fast but open binary format out of the box.

From our list, there are Apache Parquet, feather, fst, and OASIS ODS. I think Parquet is the ideal candidate for this because it is fast and popular. One drawback is that Desktop application for opening Parquet file is not ubiquitous. ODS on the other hand is much slower but has an edge that Excel, LibreOffice, and Google Sheets all support it.

Disclosures of Possible Conflicts of Interest: I am also the maintainer of readODS