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pseudosavantyesterday at 8:29 PM7 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

bs7280yesterday at 10:24 PM

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.

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telotortiumyesterday at 9:30 PM

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...

JLO64yesterday at 8:37 PM

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.

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nomelyesterday at 8:33 PM

> Bundling all of LibreOffice seems like a pretty huge dependency

What's the alternative library you see?

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tiahurayesterday at 8:56 PM

Yes. If you have word you can instruct to use word via com or AppleScript.

OutOfHereyesterday at 8:51 PM

Just the headless version looks to be bundled. The title as posted might be incorrect.