I got tired of the lock-in and black-box nature of AI inside MS Office. One vendor decides which models you can use, where your document data goes, and what the agent is actually allowed to do. And when it fails, you can't see the code or send a PR to add a feature you may need.

Many people don't have that choice: they're forced to use these tools (MS Office) at work. For coding agents we already have open interfaces like OpenCode where you can bring your own key, swap providers and models, run local, inspect everything, etc. I thought "agentic Office" needs the same.

So I built OpenDocBot: an agent that runs inside Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Bring your own provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, DeepSeek, OpenRouter, Ollama, or your own endpoint / custom gateway). It's client-side, so document data goes straight to the provider you configure, and the source is public so you can always audit the code and self-host it.

I added a few things I thought would be useful: human-in-the-loop approval before any action is applied; file uploads (e.g. building a slide deck from a PDF) with local OCR for scanned documents, and tunable model behavior.

Caveat: it's early, and Microsoft Marketplace distribution isn't live yet, so today you have to sideload it. I know that's real friction, I'm fighting daily with the MS Support team to achieve MS Partner Center account validation. I wrote some scripts that automate the sideloading process, and recorded short videos to make it easier.

If you use Office heavily, I'd love your feedback.

Repo: https://github.com/opendocbot/opendocbot

Site + docs: https://opendocbot.com

OSRS Wiki and RuneLite are under strain from low-effort AI development

CO3: Toward the Optimal FFI

Training Text-to-Image Models 3.6× Faster

Gnome 51 Released with Improved Frame Scheduling, Many App Improvements

We killed our in-app AI chat and made the agent a first-class user

Omarchy on Mac

Whiteboard Defense

Show HN: Ivx/AI Chat, AI client that doesn't track you (with a better GUI imo)

As Someone Who Has Written This Blog Post,

Numerical Tours

IPC Panic, a 4-call kernel panic in Apple XNU, up to macOS and iOS 26 included

Inside the MIT Report on How AI Is Eroding Campus Culture

GitMir just released Vibe, it's like Claude on steroids

Mercury Books – Accounting Software Built into Your Bank Account

Hacking a Xiaomi Mi Band 4 to Run Super Mario Bros

Fedora 45 beta drags the Linux console into the 21st century

AI Agents Work. So Why Is Memory Becoming a Problem?

Show HN: LaunchPad-Lite – Open-Source Next.js 15 with Better Auth and Drizzle

Show HN: OpenDocBot – bring your own model to Word, Excel and PowerPoint

Agents: The New, New Kingmakers

An Educational GEMM Ladder for Helios GPUs

Lumai Iris – First Optical Computing System

Jev means structured output is interesting again

What is LLMjacking, and why should IT pros care?

Column built an issuer processor from scratch

Set aside human extinction hypotheticals: can we keep AI from persisting itself?

Elon Musk Trains His Political Chaos Machine on the U.K

Vira: Parking control and vehicle registration platform for Norway

Digit 5 Sets a New Bar for Humanoid Robot Safety

A.I.'S Effect on the Work Force Is Showing Up in Wages

Show HN: KiwiDesk – Tiling that feels like it shipped with macOS