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OfficeCLI: Office suite for AI agents to read and edit Microsoft Office files

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Re: OfficeCLI: Office suite for AI agents to read and edit Microsoft Office files

#31

Post by wongarsu »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #25
rcarmo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI has zero need to see the renders (you are just wasting tokens) and that is why I built the Go version - I patched a lot of the PPTX code in my MCP server, as it happens.

while i appreciate that you are working on something to give away for free, providing your own little world of value... your comment makes it sound like you've never made powerpoints before. of course, there are a bajillion powerpoints out there in the wild that layer white rectangles to erase stuff from screenshots of charts, among numerous other atrocities

And if you task Claude with making a moderately sized powerpoint matching existing style guides, it will spend at most 30% of the time on the initial version. The remaining time is spent rendering out slides, looking at them and adjusting them

Of course AI can one-shot slides, but if you want good results where everything is aligned and has proper contrast you need a visual feedback loop

Re: OfficeCLI: Office suite for AI agents to read and edit Microsoft Office files

#32

Post by janalsncm »

neilv wrote: post #2

> OfficeCLI is the first and best Office suite purpose-built for AI agents to read, edit, and automate Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. Free, open-source, single binary, no Office installation required. 1. Calling Microsoft Office simply "Office" without qualification treats it like a trademark, rather than a generic term that was in use for this class of product before MS appropriated it. 2. If you're going to tre…

MS doesn’t need a reason to take your code down from GitHub. If they don’t like what your code does, they can take it down no matter how you word your readme.

Re: OfficeCLI: Office suite for AI agents to read and edit Microsoft Office files

#33

Post by maxloh »

rcarmo wrote: post #21
nojito wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your tools don't render the file though and python-pptx hasn't been updated in 2 years.

AI has zero need to see the renders (you are just wasting tokens) and that is why I built the Go version - I patched a lot of the PPTX code in my MCP server, as it happens.

I don't think so.

I have had a lot of experience creating and editing PowerPoint slides with Claude recently. It always converts the file to a PDF using LibreOffice and then renders the PDF into images to see if everything went right and that no text has overflowed.

Re: OfficeCLI: Office suite for AI agents to read and edit Microsoft Office files

#35

Post by karado »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #19

Feel like overnight I suddenly started seeing so much stuff and comments on here concerning generating Office documents with the LLMs. What could be driving this? Doesn't latex or similar seem like a better fit here?

Most corporate workplaces are super dependent on the Microsoft Office suite.

Re: OfficeCLI: Office suite for AI agents to read and edit Microsoft Office files

#36

Post by anduril22 »

FailMore wrote: post #4

I went in the opposite direction and built https://smalldocs.org/ , which is an office suite AI agents (and humans - including SWEs!) like to use. I say it’s as if “Claude Code & Microsoft Office had a baby...” Code available: https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs Discord: https://discord.gg/txjATTsDaq Sample document: https://smalldocs.org/blogs/what-is-a-smalldoc Invoked via Claude Code by saying stuff like:…

This is super cool - so many uses. Does it work well with Excel formulae?

Re: OfficeCLI: Office suite for AI agents to read and edit Microsoft Office files

#37

Post by Zambyte »

FailMore wrote: post #4

I went in the opposite direction and built https://smalldocs.org/ , which is an office suite AI agents (and humans - including SWEs!) like to use. I say it’s as if “Claude Code & Microsoft Office had a baby...” Code available: https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs Discord: https://discord.gg/txjATTsDaq Sample document: https://smalldocs.org/blogs/what-is-a-smalldoc Invoked via Claude Code by saying stuff like:…

Notably the posted project is Apache licensed, and your project is Elastic licensed. Your project looks cool and you've clearly put a lot of thought into making it useful, but the license makes it a non-starter for me.

Re: OfficeCLI: Office suite for AI agents to read and edit Microsoft Office files

#38

Post by StahlGuo »

Recently, my experience is that the hardest part of writing Enterprise document by AI is not how to generate a word or excel, but to generate a office document that is accountable. First draft generation is just a small part of the whole wore,more time consuming work is validation: whether citation , number,format, or semantic assume is right.

So i think enterprise office AI suite may need 2 layers: First is document editing, and second is revision / attribution / validation, or an unaccountable document is not applicable for real enterprise usage.

Re: OfficeCLI: Office suite for AI agents to read and edit Microsoft Office files

#39

Post by FailMore »

Zambyte wrote: post #37
FailMore wrote: post #4

I went in the opposite direction and built https://smalldocs.org/ , which is an office suite AI agents (and humans - including SWEs!) like to use. I say it’s as if “Claude Code & Microsoft Office had a baby...” Code available: https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs Discord: https://discord.gg/txjATTsDaq Sample document: https://smalldocs.org/blogs/what-is-a-smalldoc Invoked via Claude Code by saying stuff like:…

Notably the posted project is Apache licensed, and your project is Elastic licensed. Your project looks cool and you've clearly put a lot of thought into making it useful, but the license makes it a non-starter for me.

I’m open for feedback on the license. As you say/notice, I’ve put a lot of work in and I think there is a commercial pathway forward for the product. I don’t want to let someone else - who might be more experienced - take everything I’ve done and build a business with it (I’d really like to do that myself), so wasn’t sure what license to use as MIT didn’t feel right to me at the moment. But open for feedback/maybe I’m being too short sighted…

Re: OfficeCLI: Office suite for AI agents to read and edit Microsoft Office files

#40

Post by FailMore »

anduril22 wrote: post #36
FailMore wrote: post #4

I went in the opposite direction and built https://smalldocs.org/ , which is an office suite AI agents (and humans - including SWEs!) like to use. I say it’s as if “Claude Code & Microsoft Office had a baby...” Code available: https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs Discord: https://discord.gg/txjATTsDaq Sample document: https://smalldocs.org/blogs/what-is-a-smalldoc Invoked via Claude Code by saying stuff like:…

This is super cool - so many uses. Does it work well with Excel formulae?

Yep, it does. If you open https://smalldocs.org/s/tUWdfKLKBcnhnrYsoFMn4W#k=7SC6KGg-Fye... And scroll to the business model area, you’ll see it supports multi tab functionality + connected formulas.
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