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WonderPhi Office -- Batch Recipes for Microsoft Office
Publicly online since 2010 · U.S. patent applications since 2012 · inventions offered since 2014. The work of Christopher Gabriel Brown, independently documented.
Easy Setup — No Package Manager, No Account, No Cloud
Single Python file. Python 3.8+ standard library only — nothing to pip install. Run with:
python wpo-recipe.py
Sample plan files ship with the download and run out of the box. Pair with WonderPhi Compute to execute the generated plans in parallel.
WonderPhi Office — 10 batch recipes for Microsoft Office
Ten hand-written recipes that automate Word, Excel, and PowerPoint via COM. Convert 500 .docx files to PDF in a coffee break. Extract every table from every spreadsheet in a folder. Batch-render slide decks. No macros, no VBA, no ribbon-hunting.
Why this exists
Office is the world's most common batch-processing bottleneck. Everyone has a folder of 200 Word documents that need to become PDFs, or a stack of Excel workbooks that need the same manipulation applied, and the "solution" is usually a summer intern with a headache.
Office already ships with a full automation surface (COM) that most users never touch. These recipes wrap the useful parts — convert, extract, merge, render — so you can point at a folder and walk away.
What it is, in plain English
Each recipe drives Word, Excel, or PowerPoint the exact same way a person would (open document, do something, save, close) — but scripted, one file per plan-line, running in parallel across your cores. No macros embedded in files. No third-party parsers to trust. Office does the work; the recipe just tells it what to do, on repeat, for a whole folder.
How you use it — three steps
- Run the recipe file.
python wpo-recipe.pyin the folder that contains your input files, or wherever you want the plan written. - Point at the target. The recipe asks (or reads from a text file) what the input is — a folder, a list of hostnames, a CSV, whatever the recipe expects. It writes a plan file: one shell command per line.
- Hand the plan to Compute. Drop the generated
plan.wpc.txtinto the WonderPhi Compute inbox, and every command runs in parallel across your cores. Read the honest log when it's done.
Worked examples — three of the 10 recipes in this library
word-to-pdf — convert every .docx in a folder
COM opens Word, converts each document to PDF, closes it, moves to the next. Parallel: as many Word instances as you have cores.
python wpo-recipe.py word-to-pdf --input ./documents --output ./pdfs # generated plan: # powershell -Command "$w = New-Object -ComObject Word.Application; ..." (one per file)
excel-to-csv — export the active sheet of every workbook to CSV
Reads every .xlsx/.xls in the target folder, exports the active sheet as CSV.
python wpo-recipe.py excel-to-csv --input ./workbooks --output ./csv
ppt-to-images — render every slide of every deck to PNG
One folder per deck. One PNG per slide. Useful for indexing decks, thumbnailing, or feeding to OCR.
python wpo-recipe.py ppt-to-images --input ./decks --output ./slides --width 1920
Verified capabilities
Recipes require Windows with Office installed (COM is a Windows-only automation surface). Measured on a workstation with 16 cores and Office 365:
- 10 workflows automated: word-to-pdf, word-to-docx (normalize legacy formats), word-strip-metadata, excel-to-csv, excel-to-pdf, excel-to-xlsx (normalize .xls/.ods/.csv), ppt-to-pdf, ppt-to-images, office-inventory (JSON manifest of every Office file in a tree), office-sha256 (tamper-evident hash sidecars).
- 500 Word→PDF conversions in ~10 minutes on a 16-core box (about 30 minutes serial).
- No files modified in place. Every recipe reads inputs and writes to a separate output folder you specify.
Every claim is testable on your own machine using the sample plans in the download.
Under the hood — the honest technical picture
COM (Component Object Model) is Microsoft's standard for programmatic control of Office apps. This recipe library generates PowerShell one-liners that instantiate a Word/Excel/PowerPoint COM object per plan-line and drive it. Each plan-line spawns its own Office instance — Windows handles the isolation.
- No VBA, no macros. Nothing gets embedded in the files you process.
- PowerShell + COM. The generated plan-lines are one-liner PowerShell commands. You can read them; you could type them by hand.
- Office does the work. The recipe never parses Office file formats itself — it delegates to the real thing. So .docx quirks that trip up open-source parsers don't trip this up.
- Isolation per file. One crashed conversion doesn't take down the whole batch.
- Zero Python dependencies. Standard library only. The tools you need are Office itself and Python 3.8+.
How it compares to the manual way
| Aspect | The typical alternative | This product |
|---|---|---|
| Setup effort | Write a VBA macro in each doc, or a PowerShell script per task | Run one recipe with two flags |
| Reliability | VBA macros silently mangle documents | COM does what Office does when a human clicks — no format surprises |
| Auditability | Macros hide inside binary files | Generated plan is plain text you can inspect and version-control |
| Parallelism | Word opens one document at a time by default | One Word instance per core, safely isolated |
What you need
- Windows 10 / 11. COM automation is Windows-only.
- Microsoft Office installed on the machine that will run the plan. Any recent version (2016+, 365).
- Python 3.8+ to generate the plan file. Standard library only.
- WonderPhi Compute to run the plan in parallel across cores.
What's in the download
wpo-recipe.py— the recipe generator (Python 3.8+, standard library only)README.md— per-recipe reference for humansINDEX.md— alphabetical list of every recipe with a one-line descriptionsamples/— ready-to-run demo input files for every recipeLICENSE.txt— perpetual single-user license, personalized with your name and order number at delivery
Common questions
Q. Do I need one Office license per plan-line?
No. Office COM automation on a machine with an activated license lets you spawn as many local instances as your OS can hold. That's how Word already lets you open 20 documents at once.
Q. Does it work with Office 365 or only desktop Office?
Only desktop Office. Office 365 web/cloud doesn't expose COM. You need the installed desktop app.
Q. What about LibreOffice / OpenOffice?
Not covered by these 10 recipes. LibreOffice has its own headless conversion mode (soffice --headless) which is well served by the general-purpose Library recipes.
Q. Will it corrupt my documents?
No. Every recipe reads from your input folder and writes to a separate output folder. Your originals are never touched.
Glossary — every term used above, in plain English
- Recipe
- One of the ready-made plan-file templates in this library. Each recipe knows how to do one job across many inputs.
- Plan file (
*.wpc.txt) - A plain text file with one shell command per line that WonderPhi Compute reads and executes across every CPU core in parallel.
- WonderPhi Compute
- The parallel runtime this recipe library is designed for. Sold separately, or bundled in the Complete Bundle.
- Shell command
- Any line you'd normally type into a terminal / Command Prompt / PowerShell prompt.
- Standard library only
- The recipe uses only what ships with Python 3.8+ — no
pip install, no external packages. - Perpetual license
- Buy once, use forever. No renewals, no expiration, no update check.
- COM (Component Object Model)
- Microsoft's standard for programmatic control of desktop apps. It's what Office exposes so scripts can drive it the same way a human would.
- PowerShell
- The scripting shell that ships with Windows. These recipes generate PowerShell one-liners as plan-lines.
- Macro / VBA
- Code embedded inside an Office file. These recipes do NOT use macros — nothing is embedded in your files.
License & support
Retail single-user license, perpetual, non-transferable. Every download's LICENSE.txt is personalized at checkout with your name, email, and order number. Full terms live inside your download — short version: install on any machine you personally own and operate, don't redistribute, don't run it as a paid service for third parties (that needs the Industrial variant), and everything else is fine.
Support: email chris@cri-one.com. Because WonderPhi Office — 10 batch recipes for Microsoft Office never changes, there's nothing to "support" in the update sense — but if something isn't behaving the way you expect, write and I'll help.
USA-only sales for retail.
