Birbla

Discussion summary

A new OfficeCLI tool aims to help AI agents read and edit Microsoft Office files, reflecting growing interest in automating document creation. Discussions highlight the importance of Office in corporate environments and explore related tools and models.

What the discussion says

  • Office automation is increasingly relevant for AI agents.
  • Many see Microsoft Office as essential in workplaces.
  • Some compare Office automation to LaTeX or LibreOffice alternatives.
  • Developers are working on models to interact with DOCX files.
  • Questions about handling Excel formulas and macros.
“Office documents have been notoriously difficult to automate for years.”
— charlieyu1
“Most corporate workplaces are super dependent on the Microsoft Office suite.”
— karado

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  • Hacker News
  • How does this do for processing formulas or macros in excel?
    by miketery
  • I'm making a similar tool that tries to do macros as well

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

    by jbgt
  • Very good and well done. I found immediate use-case for this.
    by _pdp_
  • Is there anything like this for OpenOffice/Libreoffice? I have some ideas if there is
    by aussieguy1234
  • That is great.. Only the possibility of minimizing token usage when dealing with Office docs makes this very handy.
    by umutm
  • 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?
    by beepbooptheory
  • People want to generate corporate content. For years now, it comes and goes.
    by rcarmo
  • Office documents have been notoriously difficult to automate for years. I think old .doc files were just a memory dump
    by charlieyu1
  • The idea of Latex being used in business environments could be a meme
    by nbevans
  • Most corporate workplaces are super dependent on the Microsoft Office suite.
    by karado
  • 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.

    by jbgt
  • 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.
    by pietz
  • 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?
    by dayone1
  • 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.

    by StahlGuo
  • 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 ?

    by allan_s
  • > 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 treat it like a trademark, don't violate it in the same sentence.

    by neilv
  • 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.
    by janalsncm
  • 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: “sdoc me the plan for this feature”, or “dig into our logs and sdoc me a report on our latency”

    by FailMore
  • Great job on this. I can see this being extremely useful for my teams!
    by etothet
  • Neat! I think agents making Word docs and PowerPoints is going to go away. I think something like small docs is the future.
    by nimonian
  • I built some scripts to do something similar but all local. It also live updates the document so you can see changes come through. Super useful
    by keithnz
  • This looks neat, but I don't see any examples of the format on the webpage (And no, I am not going to install Node.js just to see examples of the format).
    by lelanthran
  • This is super cool - so many uses. Does it work well with Excel formulae?
    by anduril22
  • This is really neat! I have been thinking about similar problems.

    Is there a way to collaborate with multiple agents or people on the same doc? It is unclear to me.

    by philips
  • > 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.

    by maxloh
  • I find it so amusing that small dev's get it so right, yeh a trillion dollar company can't figure out what copilot is to their ecosystem.
    by wonderwallaus
  • Nice, but I don't see a lot of ECMA 376 test cases. Both https://github.com/rcarmo/python-office-mcp-server and https://github.com/rcarmo/go-ooxml are ECMA 376 compliant (I made sure), because for headless generation and handling that's kind of important :)

    Oh, and you're not the first, I started this a year ago. :)

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