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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

#51

Post by pietz »

dayone1 wrote: post #7
pietz wrote: post #5

If you don't need interactive/animated features, I can absolutely recommend to have the agent build slides in HTML and convert it to PDF. Has been a game changer for me.

I’m having trouble having it take reference PowerPoint slides and converting them to html, chart and labels misplaced, the charts don’t look drawn properly, etc. how did you solve this?

I don't have a great solution here. I rebuilt our PPT master fully in HTML and I'm using a modified version of Google's DESIGN.md to store the references.

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

#52

Post by dumbmachine »

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 so cool! Loved your agent instruction snippet too.

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

#53

Post by reddalo »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #41
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?

Office documents have been notoriously difficult to automate for years. I think old .doc files were just a memory dump

The first version of the .doc format was actually a memory dump, which poses security risks and that's why modern Office refuses to open pre-Office '97 .doc files by default.

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

#55

Post by Semaphor »

FailMore wrote: post #47
maxloh wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Elastic License 2.0. The source is public and you may use, copy, modify, and redistribute it. You may not offer SmallDocs to third parties as a hosted or managed service, strip its licensing notices, or circumvent its license-key functionality. It is not open source unfortunately.

I posted the same thing below, but I’m open for feedback on the license. 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 re commercialisation - 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 m…

Personally, I like the elastic (and similar) license… as long as, as you did, it’s chosen upfront. Being open source as a marketing strategy and later switching to source available licenses is what I find highly [0] problematic.

[0]: With a bit of an understandable carve out if it turns out no one else ever contributed anything of significance.

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

#57

Post by 8cvor6j844qw_d6 »

FailMore wrote: post #47
maxloh wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Elastic License 2.0. The source is public and you may use, copy, modify, and redistribute it. You may not offer SmallDocs to third parties as a hosted or managed service, strip its licensing notices, or circumvent its license-key functionality. It is not open source unfortunately.

I posted the same thing below, but I’m open for feedback on the license. 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 re commercialisation - 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 m…

> so wasn’t sure what license to use as MIT didn’t feel right to me at the moment

You're onto the right track if you have plans for commercialisation.

Thanks for building this, I've tested it out and it's useful.

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

#58

Post by [deleted] »

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:…

[deleted]

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

#59

Post by wongarsu »

rcarmo wrote: post #43
doctorpangloss wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, but automatically generated content doesn’t need to do that - like I wrote in another comment, my agents know how to check bounding boxes.

But bounding boxes don't always match what you want to do visually. Often you need to align to the baseline of text instead of its bounding box. And often you need to compensate for visual weight, making things different sizes so they appear more similarly sized to the eye

I'm not saying a pure API view won't work, but it will be a quality compromise compared to also having visual inspection

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

#60

Post by allan_s »

Is it better than letting claude code use python directly ? Especially on those 3 metrics: 1. better prompt adherence 2. visually more pleasing 3. token consumption

Especially as I think claude code got some reinforcement learning on these use cases ?

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