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The ChatGPT desktop app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice
(simonwillison.net)
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this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2026
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Looks like it's some kind of dependency… seems very odd though, why is this included? Are they using it to handle .docx, .xlsx, etc files? I remember being tempted to do that once years ago when I ran into one of those Really Hard Problems that would take weeks to solve. I spent the weeks instead
I think they're used so agents can make changes to Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. It seems to be using the headless version of LibreOffice.
I didn't think LibreOffice supported the latest versions of office formats though, so wouldnt it potentially break existing files if used?
Maybe not for advanced function (resulting in re-arranged objects) but the common stuff should still be parsable.
Yeah… I didn't want to include 430MB of bloat in my bundle to each end user though for one feature, so I did it the hard way instead: Manually editing document files using XPATH. Maybe I'm too old school, if everyone's shipping 1GB+ apps like it's nothing nowadays.