Office → Markdown Skill

Converts office automation documents — PDF, PPTX, DOCX, XLSX, CSV — into clean, readable Markdown. Use this skill when a user explicitly asks to convert, extract, or turn an uploaded document into Markdown (e.g. "convert this PDF to markdown", "extract the text from this Word doc", "turn this into markdown"). Do NOT trigger on a bare file upload alone — wait for a clear conversion request. Handles both text-based and image-based / scanned documents via Claude vision (requires user confirmation before sending images to the API).

Convert any uploaded office document to clean Markdown. All conversion logic lives in scripts/ — load only the script you need.

Security notes

• Dependencies are installed into an isolated temp directory (/tmp/office_md_deps/) and pinned to reviewed versions. The system Python environment is not modified.
• For scanned or image-only content, pages are sent to Anthropic's vision API. Always ask the user for confirmation before enabling vision (see Workflow step 3).

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Script Reference

Format	Extensions	Script
PDF (text + scanned/image)	.pdf	scripts/pdf-to-md.py
PowerPoint	.pptx, .ppt	scripts/pptx-to-md.py
Word	.docx, .doc	scripts/docx-to-md.py
Excel	.xlsx, .xls	scripts/xlsx-to-md.py
CSV	.csv	scripts/csv-to-md.py

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Workflow

1. Confirm conversion intent

Only proceed if the user has explicitly asked to convert, extract, or export the document to Markdown. A bare file upload without a conversion request is not sufficient to trigger this skill.

2. Run the matching script (text-only pass first)

bash

python scripts/<script-name>.py \
  /mnt/user-data/uploads/<input-file> \
  /mnt/user-data/outputs/<stem>.md

Each script installs its own pinned dependencies into /tmp/office_md_deps/ on first run (isolated from the system Python environment).

3. Vision consent — REQUIRED before image extraction

If the script output indicates image-only pages were detected (or the document is known to be scanned), stop and ask the user:

"This document has N image-only page(s) that cannot be extracted without sending them to Anthropic's vision API. Page images will be transmitted externally for OCR. Would you like to proceed with vision extraction?"

Only if the user confirms, re-run with the --allow-vision flag:

bash

python scripts/<script-name>.py \
  /mnt/user-data/uploads/<input-file> \
  /mnt/user-data/outputs/<stem>.md \
  --allow-vision

If the user declines, save the text-only result and note which pages were skipped.

4. Present the file

Use present_files with the output .md path, then give a brief summary:

• File type and page/slide/sheet count
• Whether vision was used and for how many pages (or that it was skipped)

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How vision works (PDF / PPTX / DOCX)

Each script uses a two-pass strategy:

1. Text pass — extract text normally (fast, no API call, always runs)
2. Vision pass — only runs when --allow-vision is passed AND pages had no extractable text; those pages are rendered and sent to the Claude vision API

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Edge Cases

Situation	Behaviour
Fully scanned PDF	All pages flagged for vision; user confirmation required
Mixed PDF (some text, some images)	Only image pages flagged; user confirmation required
User declines vision	Text-only .md is saved; skipped pages are noted inline
Password-protected file	Script exits with a clear error message
Very large PDF (50+ image pages)	Script adds 0.3s sleep between vision calls
Image too large (>4MB base64)	Reduce DPI: edit dpi=150 → dpi=100 in pdf-to-md.py
Encoding errors in CSV	Script auto-retries with latin-1