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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

#61
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Font kerning software takes into account all of those things without writing to a pixel buffer and visually inspecting it.

Not saying that LLMs can do this, but there are algorithms which can, and neural networks are universal function approximators, so it is plausible.

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

#63
Nice! i'm making the same - interesting that so many ideas converge. Hopefully we can soon point an GPT6 at all of them and have a super tool. Or else GPT6 can do it without all our helpers...

https://github.com/odcpw/ooxml-cli

Glad to get feedback on what doesn't work or is missing.

I'm also making one for PowerBI - it's in testing. Drop me a line if you're interested.

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

#64
post #46

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?

The idea of Latex being used in business environments could be a meme

Yeah, but it just feels so ridiculous the other way too! The reason people use Word et al instead markup languages is because of the UI, right? Why does that matter here? After you generate a final PDF, no one needs to know how you made it?

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

#68
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

People overestimate what LLMs can see vs what they tell you they can “see”
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