Is there a simple way to write an ODT using Python?

Your mileage with odfpy may vary. I didn't like it - I ended up using a template ODT, created in OpenOffice, oppening the contents.xml with ziplib and elementtree, and updating that. (In your case, it would create only the relevant table rows and table cell nodes), then recorded everything back.

It is actually straightforward, but for making ElementTree properly work with the XML namespaces. (it is badly documente) But it can be done. I don't have the example, sorry.

To edit odt files, my answer may not help, but if you want to create new odt files, you can use QTextDocument, QTextCursor and QTextDocumentWriter in PyQt4. A simple example to show how to write to an odt file:

>>>from pyqt4 import QtGui
# Create a document object
>>>doc = QtGui.QTextDocument()
# Create a cursor pointing to the beginning of the document
>>>cursor = QtGui.QTextCursor(doc)
# Insert some text
>>>cursor.insertText('Hello world')
# Create a writer to save the document
>>>writer = QtGui.QTextDocumentWriter()
>>>writer.supportedDocumentFormats()
[PyQt4.QtCore.QByteArray(b'HTML'), PyQt4.QtCore.QByteArray(b'ODF'), PyQt4.QtCore.QByteArray(b'plaintext')]
>>>odf_format = writer.supportedDocumentFormats()[1]
>>>writer.setFormat(odf_format)
>>>writer.setFileName('hello_world.odt')
>>>writer.write(doc) # Return True if successful
True

QTextCursor also can insert tables, frames, blocks, images. More information. More information at: http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/qtextcursor.html

As a bonus, you also can print to a pdf file by using QPrinter.