Comment by pseudosavant
10 hours ago
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.
10 hours ago
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.
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.
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/
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/844386f762c4b3bab49999ba...
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.
Seems to match the screenshot in the blogpost but libreoffice-headless still shows as 429.7 MB.
> Bundling all of LibreOffice seems like a pretty huge dependency
What's the alternative library you see?
Apache POI
I don't think that's anywhere near equivalent. That's for reading and writing Microsoft Office docs. It has no office functionality. LibreOffice has a full API, for example to run calculations on spreadsheets [1].
The goal of bringing in dependencies is so you don't have to duplicate the functionality, in this case, crafted over decades of effort.
[1] https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/SDKGuide/C...
[dead]
pandoc
Why not computer use or using the tools the user prefers instead? The primary office suites have APIs/CLIs now
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.
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.
3 replies →
[flagged]
Yes. If you have word you can instruct to use word via com or AppleScript.
Just the headless version looks to be bundled. The title as posted might be incorrect.