I've been working on something related - extracting tons of data from various formats to allow searching them - and the solution I chose for xlxs and xls files was headless LibreOffice to convert them to CSV. There's also exceljs but I found it didn't work for many old xls files.
I didn't find screenshotting of spreadsheets worked well, vision wasn't very accurate on them. I do use it for PDFs though. For docx it's probably fine either way but I went with LibreOffice -> markdown.
I went with the python libraries (pydoc and pyxls for example), because it's portable and doesn't require a big download to a users system if they don't already have it installed.
I've been working on something related - extracting tons of data from various formats to allow searching them - and the solution I chose for xlxs and xls files was headless LibreOffice to convert them to CSV. There's also exceljs but I found it didn't work for many old xls files.
I didn't find screenshotting of spreadsheets worked well, vision wasn't very accurate on them. I do use it for PDFs though. For docx it's probably fine either way but I went with LibreOffice -> markdown.
I went with the python libraries (pydoc and pyxls for example), because it's portable and doesn't require a big download to a users system if they don't already have it installed.
How about jpegs or other scanner images files? We have hundreds of scanned documents that were never pdf wrapped.
hmmmm :)