dsh-office-live

Live Office tools for DeepSeek Harness: read, screenshot and edit the document the user currently has open in Word / Excel / PowerPoint — no file round-trips, no "close and reopen", the change appears in the window the user is looking at.

Unlike dsh-office-tools (which reads and writes .docx/.xlsx/.pptx files), this plugin attaches to the running Office application through COM and works on the live document — including whatever the user has typed since the file was saved.

Demo

A live Word window after office_live_edit appended two sections and a table — the change is already on screen, nothing was saved:

Excel: office_live_read returned the evaluated formula values, then excel.set_cell wrote a new "备注" column into the open workbook:

PowerPoint: ppt.set_text rewrote the bullet list and ppt.add_slide added the second slide:

How it is built (three layers, the JSON bridge, why results go through a UTF-8 side file, why edits are not saved by default): docs/HOW-IT-WORKS.md (in Chinese).

Tools

Tool	What it does
office_live_status	Which of Word / Excel / PowerPoint is running and which documents are open
office_live_read	Read live contents as JSON (Word paragraphs + styles, Excel cells with evaluated formulas, PowerPoint shapes)
office_live_shot	PNG screenshot of the application window (ribbon and page)
office_live_snapshot	read + shot in one call — best starting point before editing
office_live_edit	Batch live edits (paragraphs, find/replace, tables, cells, slides)
office_live_open	Open a file in the real application so edits are visible on screen
office_live_close	Close the window (optionally saving)

office_live_edit operations:

• Word — word.append_paragraph, word.insert_paragraph_before, word.set_paragraph, word.replace, word.insert_table, word.insert_page_break
• Excel — excel.set_cell, excel.set_range, excel.add_sheet
• PowerPoint — ppt.set_text, ppt.add_slide

Requirements

• Windows with a desktop Microsoft Office installation (COM ProgIDs Word.Application, Excel.Application, PowerPoint.Application). Tested with Office LTSC 2024.
• Windows PowerShell 5.1+ (powershell.exe); override with the OFFICE_LIVE_POWERSHELL environment variable (for example pwsh.exe).
• Maybe counter-intuitive but real Office only. Microsoft Store "Office" stubs and web versions expose no COM automation; WPS Office uses different ProgIDs.

Safety

• Attaches to an already running instance; it never creates a hidden copy of a document.
• Edits are not saved unless save: true is passed, so the user can review the change in the window, undo it with Ctrl+Z, or ask for more changes first.
• Word reads are capped at the first 400 paragraphs; Excel reads the active sheet's used range up to 200 rows × 40 columns.
• Taking a screenshot brings the window to the foreground (it steals focus for a moment).

Install

# from the plugin market UI: add  dsh-office-live
# or from a checkout / tarball:
dsh plugin --profile desktop add ./dsh-office-live-0.1.0.tgz

Then restart DSH. The tools appear in every new session.

How it is wired

lib/index.js registers the seven tools with @deepseek-ai/dsh-tools and shells out to assets/office-live.ps1, passing -ResultFile (a UTF-8 side file, so Chinese text is not mangled by the Windows console code page). The script does the COM and screenshot work and prints one JSON object per call.

License

MIT