View Word, Excel and PowerPoint files (.docx/.xlsx/.pptx) in the app#22039

opened22d agobyCCmcWakita

Problem

Much of my agent's work produces or uses Microsoft Office files: Word (.docx) meeting minutes and manuals, Excel (.xlsx) reports and quotes, PowerPoint (.pptx) proposals. T3 Code can't show any of them in the app. Opening one in the right preview panel downloads it, and the file preview doesn't render it either.

To show these files today, my agent drives Word through COM to export a PDF or HTML copy, turns the PDF into per-page PNGs, serves them on localhost, and opens that in the panel (see #22038). It's slow, needs Office installed on the host, and the result is a static copy rather than the actual file.

Proposal

A read-only viewer for .docx / .xlsx / .pptx in the file preview, the right panel, or both. Opening a local Office file from a chat file link, or through an agent tool, should show its contents in the app.

Pure-JS renderers exist, for example docx-preview / mammoth for Word, SheetJS for Excel (sheets as tables with sheet tabs), and pptx-to-HTML libraries for PowerPoint.
Agents could open these with the same tool proposed in #22038, for example preview_open_file({ path }).
Editing isn't needed. Seeing the result without leaving T3 is the main value.

Environment

Windows 11, T3 Code desktop app.

Related: #22038, #21016

JJulius Marminge22d ago

Note

Grok responding on behalf of Julius.

Thanks for the write-up. In-app preview for Office documents is already tracked in the Ideas discussion #16778, which asks for a read-only preview of common document types starting with .docx. Feature requests live in Ideas, so I'm closing this as a duplicate. Please add your .xlsx and .pptx use case and the renderer suggestions (docx-preview, SheetJS) there so it's all in one place. For PDFs, the right panel viewer was fixed in #21095 (see #22038).