OfficeCLI

Why It Is Worth Installing

Ask a bot without it for a budget and you get a markdown table. Useful, until someone wants to change a number and see the total update. A spreadsheet is not a table — it is formulas, formatting, and a file the rest of a company can open.

OfficeCLI is a command-line tool built for agents to drive, and it writes the real OpenXML formats directly. No Office licence, no Windows, no headless copy of Excel running somewhere. It works the same way on OpenClaw and on Hermes.

Install It

1. Open the dashboard and go to Tools in the sidebar.
2. Pick the bot you want it on — tools install per instance, and it must be running.
3. Install OfficeCLI. It arrives at a pinned, checksum-verified version and runs inside your own container rather than as a call out to a document service — so building a file does not hand it to a third party. There is no separate service to keep alive.

On Hermes, restart the bot afterwards if it does not seem to notice the new tool — its skill index is built when the gateway starts. OpenClaw picks it up on the next message.

Then Just Ask

You never type a command. The agent knows the tool is there and reaches for it when the request calls for a document. Things that work well:

• “Turn last month’s numbers into a spreadsheet with a total row and a chart of the trend.”
• “Write this up as a Word document with headings, and put the summary table on page one.”
• “Make a ten-slide deck from these notes, one point per slide.”
• “Here is our contract template — fill in these five fields and send it back.”
• “Read this spreadsheet and tell me which rows break the rule.”

The file comes back in whatever chat you are in — Telegram, WhatsApp, Feishu, WeChat, Discord, Slack or the web chat.

What It Can Actually Do

More than “write a file”, which is why it is worth knowing what to ask for:

• Formulas that evaluate. It supports hundreds of Excel functions and computes them as it writes, so the workbook opens with real values rather than a grid of unevaluated strings.
• Pivot tables and charts. Pivots generated natively from a source range, and a wide chart range including the specialist ones — box-and-whisker, Pareto.
• Template merge. Give it a document with {{placeholder}} markers and the values, and it fills them in — which is the whole of most contract, invoice and offer-letter workflows.
• Reading and querying. It is not write-only: the agent can open a document you send, pull specific cells or sections, and answer about them.
• Validation. Documents are checked against the OpenXML schema, so you get a file that opens rather than one that makes Word complain.
• Rendering. It can render a document to HTML or images, which is how a bot can show you what a page will look like before sending it.
• Batch edits. Many changes applied as one transaction rather than a sequence that can half-fail.
• Extras that matter to some. LaTeX equations, CSV and TSV import, right-to-left and multi-language text.

Getting Better Output

• Say the format. “As an Excel file” removes any doubt about whether you wanted a table in chat.
• Supply the template when you have one. Filling your document beats asking the bot to invent a layout that matches your brand.
• Ask for formulas explicitly if you want a live workbook — “use a SUM formula for the total, not the computed number”.
• Iterate on the file rather than starting over. “Same workbook, add a column for margin” keeps the formatting you already liked.
• For a repeated report, write the recipe once as a skill — sections, styling, which numbers go where — and every future run follows it. With Skill Sync your other bots follow it too.

Running It Yourself

OfficeCLI is open source (Apache-2.0) at github.com/iOfficeAI/OfficeCLI, so a self-hosted bot can use it too — install the CLI on the machine the agent runs on and tell the agent it is available, the same way you would with any other command-line tool. On managed hosting the Tools page does the fetching, version pinning and checksum verification for you, which is the part that is tedious to keep right by hand.

Troubleshooting

• The bot answers with a markdown table instead of a file. Say the format explicitly. If it still will not, check the tool shows as installed on that bot — tools are per instance.
• Hermes does not seem to know about it. Restart the bot so its skill index is rebuilt.
• The file never arrives in chat. Generation and delivery are separate steps, and some platforms are fussier about attachments than others. Ask for it again, or try the same request in web chat to see whether the file was built at all.
• Formulas show as text. Ask for the formula rather than the value — the agent will otherwise often compute the number itself and write that.

Try It

Install it from Tools, then send your bot a messy CSV and ask for “a clean spreadsheet with totals and a chart”. The round trip takes under a minute and makes the point better than any description.

Related: the Tools catalog, MarkItDown, Stirling PDF, Google Sheets, Hermes hosting.