zlacker

>>martin+(OP)
> On one hand, you have Microsoft's (awful) Copilot integration for Excel (in fairness, the Gemini integration in Google Sheets is also bad). So you can imagine financial directors trying to use it and it making a complete mess of the most simple tasks and never touching it again.

Microsoft has spent 30 years designing the most contrived XML-based format for Excel/Word/Powerpoint documents, so that it cannot be parsed except by very complicated bespoke applications with hundreds of developers involved.

Now, it's impossible to export any of those documents into plain text that an LLM can understand, and Microsoft Copilot literally doesn't work no matter how much money they throw at it. My company is now migrating Word documents to Markdown because they're seeing how powerful AI is.

This is karmic justice imo.

>>smuhak+le
> Microsoft has spent 30 years designing the most contrived XML-based format for Excel/Word/Powerpoint documents, so that it cannot be parsed except by very complicated bespoke applications with hundreds of developers involved.

I had interns use c++ to unzip, parse, and repackage to json a standardized visio doc. I had no say in the standard, but specific blocks meant specific things, etc. The project was successful. The xml was parse-able... at least for our needs. The overall project died a swift death and this tidbit will probably be forgotten forever in the depths of repo heirarchy.