5 ms·

Is that what it is using to render and manipulate MS Office documents? That'd explain the poor rendering of some of my files. Bundling all of LibreOffice seems

Is that what it is using to render and manipulate MS Office documents? That'd explain the poor rendering of some of my files. Bundling all of LibreOffice seems like a pretty huge dependency.

bs7280 16d ago
What's ironic about this is, afaik there's no programmatic way to get a screenshot of a PowerPoint on windows other than opening up PowerPoint and screenshotting it. I only discovered this when I first tried out Anthropics official PowerPoint skill when it came out this winter. If anything happens from this, I hope it forces Microsoft to address some of its long standing hostile to power users issues so they can stay relevant in the world of AI tooling.
- pseudosavant 15d ago
  This can absolutely be done programmatically. I just added the ability to do that using PowerPoint for Windows yesterday in my uv/python tool `markdown-pptx`. Codex added the functionality in less than 5 minutes. https://github.com/pseudosavant/markdown-pptx/ https://github.com/pseudosavant/markdown-pptx/
  - bs7280 15d ago
    Thanks for sharing, now im wondering if they did in fact grant my wish since I messed with this in January. Im lucky my job does not require me to make any pptx presentations.
  - pseudosavant 14d ago
    For those that are interested, this inspired me to create a tool just for exporting images and PDFs of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. Check out the repo below, or if you have uv installed just run `uvx office-export skill install` or `uvx office-export --help` to check it out. It uses Office for Windows, so it is Windows only. I don't currently have access to a Mac machine, so I can't build in Mac support yet. https://github.com/pseudosavant/office-export https://github.com/pseudosavant/office-export
- artpar 15d ago
  I have made puppt cli for this, it includes high dpi rendering per-slide/all-slides and in place editing https://github.com/artpar/puppt https://github.com/artpar/puppt it allows your llms to see the ppt files structurally apart from just rendering it
  - pseudosavant 15d ago
    Cool project! I'm playing around with some similar stuff, but via uv/Python. Impressive you aren't leveraging any other existing libraries for OpenXML parsing, editing, or rendering. Any especially tricky gotchas you've run into for this tool?
    - artpar 14d ago
      Yeah thanks to LLM hill climbing and PPTs being easily available and they being nothing more than just xmls this did not involve any gotchas, just a about a weeks worth of goal chasing with manual verification. I did have to stop LLM into hardcoding a lot of times trying to escape the actual goal. But based on this I thought I could make something similar for cad files, and they turned out to be an entirely different monster. the cad spec is like 1000x bigger than ppts, cad files themselves were hard to gather for test targets. 70-80% of their spec is public and remaining is driven by private vendors. the format itself is in binary. The LLM has been chasing that goal since about 2 months now and its nowhere close.
Dmitry-kov 11d ago
[flagged]
nomel 16d ago
> Bundling all of LibreOffice seems like a pretty huge dependency What's the alternative library you see?
- deleted 15d ago
  [deleted]
- nmatej1 11d ago
  https://github.com/eigenpal/docx-editor https://github.com/eigenpal/docx-editor
- verdverm 16d ago
  Why not computer use or using the tools the user prefers instead? The primary office suites have APIs/CLIs now
  - deleted 16d ago
    [deleted]
  - johnsmith1840 15d ago
    If you've ever actually gone down this route you will try exactly this realize how much of a cluster f these products are and just use libre. I did the exact same thing in my AI system. Spent an ENOURMOUS amount of time trying everything I could and in the end libre was the only thing even somewhat functional. Easily 2 months of my life lost to these god forsaken systems. APIs and CLIs sound reasonable until you actually attempt anything in this space. Computer use is exactly the same thing. Go try this: go to a google doc and dev tools check out the dom and now do the same for a word doc. Eye gouging pain of trying to get anything to work.
  - tyre 16d ago
    Computer use is slow and can take control of the application focus. I’ll be doing things while Claude runs in the background. Suddenly it decides to open the app and try to do something + screenshot it.
    - 15d ago
JLO64 16d ago
For a docker image of mine I was bundling the full version of LibreOffice as well but I managed to get some space savings by bundling just the no-gui version.
- zamadatix 16d ago
  Seems to match the screenshot in the blogpost but libreoffice-headless still shows as 429.7 MB.
deleted 16d ago
[deleted]
OutOfHere 16d ago
Just the headless version looks to be bundled. The title as posted might be incorrect.
tiahura 16d ago
Yes. If you have word you can instruct to use word via com or AppleScript.
telotortium 16d ago
I have a skill that instructs ChatGPT/Codex to verify the rendering using the Mac versions of Microsoft Office. Even without registering, you still can open files read-only, which is enough. Apparently Office refuses to open some Open Office XML documents that LibreOffice is fine with, so that's another reason to use this. After a few times, Codex ended up storing some memories to stop producing broken files in the first place. I generated the skill originally for ChatGPT 5.5, so some of these may not strictly be necessary anymore with later models. But posting here in case others find it useful: https://gist.github.com/telotortium/844386f762c4b3bab49999ba99f72f5b https://gist.github.com/telotortium/844386f762c4b3bab49999ba...

Is that what it is using to render and manipulate MS Office documents? That'd explain the poor rendering of some of my files. Bundling all of LibreOffice seems like a pretty huge dependency.

bs7280 16d ago

What's ironic about this is, afaik there's no programmatic way to get a screenshot of a PowerPoint on windows other than opening up PowerPoint and screenshotting it. I only discovered this when I first tried out Anthropics official PowerPoint skill when it came out this winter. If anything happens from this, I hope it forces Microsoft to address some of its long standing hostile to power users issues so they can stay relevant in the world of AI tooling.

pseudosavant 15d ago
This can absolutely be done programmatically. I just added the ability to do that using PowerPoint for Windows yesterday in my uv/python tool `markdown-pptx`. Codex added the functionality in less than 5 minutes. https://github.com/pseudosavant/markdown-pptx/ https://github.com/pseudosavant/markdown-pptx/
- bs7280 15d ago
  Thanks for sharing, now im wondering if they did in fact grant my wish since I messed with this in January. Im lucky my job does not require me to make any pptx presentations.
- pseudosavant 14d ago
  For those that are interested, this inspired me to create a tool just for exporting images and PDFs of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. Check out the repo below, or if you have uv installed just run `uvx office-export skill install` or `uvx office-export --help` to check it out. It uses Office for Windows, so it is Windows only. I don't currently have access to a Mac machine, so I can't build in Mac support yet. https://github.com/pseudosavant/office-export https://github.com/pseudosavant/office-export
artpar 15d ago
I have made puppt cli for this, it includes high dpi rendering per-slide/all-slides and in place editing https://github.com/artpar/puppt https://github.com/artpar/puppt it allows your llms to see the ppt files structurally apart from just rendering it
- pseudosavant 15d ago
  Cool project! I'm playing around with some similar stuff, but via uv/Python. Impressive you aren't leveraging any other existing libraries for OpenXML parsing, editing, or rendering. Any especially tricky gotchas you've run into for this tool?
  - artpar 14d ago
    Yeah thanks to LLM hill climbing and PPTs being easily available and they being nothing more than just xmls this did not involve any gotchas, just a about a weeks worth of goal chasing with manual verification. I did have to stop LLM into hardcoding a lot of times trying to escape the actual goal. But based on this I thought I could make something similar for cad files, and they turned out to be an entirely different monster. the cad spec is like 1000x bigger than ppts, cad files themselves were hard to gather for test targets. 70-80% of their spec is public and remaining is driven by private vendors. the format itself is in binary. The LLM has been chasing that goal since about 2 months now and its nowhere close.

Dmitry-kov 11d ago

[flagged]

nomel 16d ago

> Bundling all of LibreOffice seems like a pretty huge dependency What's the alternative library you see?

deleted 15d ago
[deleted]
nmatej1 11d ago
https://github.com/eigenpal/docx-editor https://github.com/eigenpal/docx-editor
verdverm 16d ago
Why not computer use or using the tools the user prefers instead? The primary office suites have APIs/CLIs now
- deleted 16d ago
  [deleted]
- johnsmith1840 15d ago
  If you've ever actually gone down this route you will try exactly this realize how much of a cluster f these products are and just use libre. I did the exact same thing in my AI system. Spent an ENOURMOUS amount of time trying everything I could and in the end libre was the only thing even somewhat functional. Easily 2 months of my life lost to these god forsaken systems. APIs and CLIs sound reasonable until you actually attempt anything in this space. Computer use is exactly the same thing. Go try this: go to a google doc and dev tools check out the dom and now do the same for a word doc. Eye gouging pain of trying to get anything to work.
- tyre 16d ago
  Computer use is slow and can take control of the application focus. I’ll be doing things while Claude runs in the background. Suddenly it decides to open the app and try to do something + screenshot it.
  - 15d ago

JLO64 16d ago

For a docker image of mine I was bundling the full version of LibreOffice as well but I managed to get some space savings by bundling just the no-gui version.

zamadatix 16d ago
Seems to match the screenshot in the blogpost but libreoffice-headless still shows as 429.7 MB.

deleted 16d ago

[deleted]

OutOfHere 16d ago

Just the headless version looks to be bundled. The title as posted might be incorrect.

tiahura 16d ago

Yes. If you have word you can instruct to use word via com or AppleScript.

telotortium 16d ago

I have a skill that instructs ChatGPT/Codex to verify the rendering using the Mac versions of Microsoft Office. Even without registering, you still can open files read-only, which is enough. Apparently Office refuses to open some Open Office XML documents that LibreOffice is fine with, so that's another reason to use this. After a few times, Codex ended up storing some memories to stop producing broken files in the first place. I generated the skill originally for ChatGPT 5.5, so some of these may not strictly be necessary anymore with later models. But posting here in case others find it useful: https://gist.github.com/telotortium/844386f762c4b3bab49999ba99f72f5b https://gist.github.com/telotortium/844386f762c4b3bab49999ba...