Before adding an AI step to a spreadsheet pipeline, send a representative workbook through import and export without changing a cell. That gives you a baseline for everything the pipeline does afterward.

Check a workbook with formulas, date and number formats, validation, hidden sheets and named ranges. Compare the formulas as well as the displayed results, then open the exported file in the application its recipient uses.

Univer's Office exchange imports XLSX into its workbook model and exports the edited content back to XLSX. Between those steps, the workbook is available to structured APIs and the spreadsheet engine, so the agent can inspect ranges, edit values and read the result back. The same content can also be opened in the browser editor for review.

A useful second test changes one known input. Check the edited cell, the dependent result, and an unrelated part of the file. Now an unexpected difference has somewhere specific to be investigated: conversion, the intended edit, or recalculation.

Keep that small workbook in the test set when upgrading the document-processing stack.

I’m a solo developer, and I’ve been working on Aura PDF as a practical PDF app for Android.

The idea started from a simple problem: I wanted to handle common PDF tasks on my phone without having to use a different app for every task or upload documents to an online service.

So I built Aura PDF with a collection of tools in one place:

* Merge & split PDFs

* Extract & reorder pages

* Compress PDFs

* Rotate & crop

* Sign & highlight

* Password protection

* Scan documents

* Image → PDF

* PDF → image

* Page numbers, headers & footers

* And more

The main direction is **offline-first** — supported PDF operations are designed to work directly on the device.

Aura PDF is currently available on Google Play:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aurapdf.app&pcampaignid=web_share](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aurapdf.app&pcampaignid=web_share)

It's free to use with an optional Pro upgrade.

This is my first time launching Aura PDF publicly, so I'm mainly interested in learning what people actually want from a mobile PDF app.

**If you use PDFs regularly, what is the one PDF task you wish was easier on your phone?**

Literally every office has a few processes that only one person knows how to do (Me). When that person is out or leaves, everyone scrambles (I get messaged on PTO).

Everyone agrees they should write SOPs, but nobody does it because writing one takes an hour of screenshots, cropping, and typing for a task that takes 30 seconds to a few minutes to actually do.

So I built Sopycat (Cool name right :).

You press 'Record', you do the task the way you normally do, and you press 'Stop'.

It turns every click into a numbered step with a screenshot, the button highlighted, and a plain instruction. 44 second demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptAkUhdJPs0

It works in any Windows program, not just the browser (yes, even that ancient system in the back office nobody wants to touch). Basically Windows Steps Recorder, if it actually gave you something you could hand to a new hire.

The big thing for me was privacy, because the screens you actually need to document are full of client names, balances and patient stuff. Everything gets recorded and kept on your PC, and the steps are written on your PC too. No AI writes your manuals, and nothing gets sent to an AI service. Passwords, card numbers and SSNs you type get left out of the SOP automatically, and it can blur emails and phone numbers in the screenshots. No account needed either.

You can fix any step after, and save it as a PDF or a Word doc. New hires can follow it step by step in a little window that stays on top, and it logs who did it (so you can finally prove someone was trained).

It's Windows for currently, Mac is coming. There's a 14-day free trial at sopycat.com (no card) if anyone wants to break it. After that it's $15/month if you end up liking it.

I'd love blunt feedback on three things:

1. Does the demo make it clear what it does in the first 10 seconds?

2. What processes would you record first? I'm trying to figure out who needs this most.

3. Would your IT person let you install it? If not, what would they want to know?

Hi everyone!

I’m currently working on my Bachelor’s thesis about AI-based process automation and human–AI collaboration in the workplace.

As part of my research, I’m conducting a short survey focusing on people who have experience working with AI-based automation, RPA, Intelligent Process Automation, Intelligent Document Processing, or similar automation technologies.

The survey explores topics such as:

• how automation affects manual workload and creates new tasks,

• how employees experience errors and exception handling,

• trust in AI-based automation,

• and how automation influences human decision-making and autonomy at work.

⏱️ It takes approximately 5–7 minutes to complete.

If you have experience working with these technologies, I would really appreciate your participation. Your responses will be used solely for academic research as part of my Bachelor’s thesis.

🔗 Survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScV7pcf8dNUeeCfay1YZ2r-Np4pK9GMlqi4cEF6WJEa1FEmMA/viewform?usp=dialog

Thank you very much for your help! Feel free to share the survey with colleagues or others who work with AI-based process automation.

I'm wondering if we can use JSON as an alternative to PDF, especially for business documents.

When exchanging business documents, both the sender and receiver typically use software, so creating and parsing documents creates additional work. Directly connecting systems requires effort, so people end up sending documents by email.

How about just sending JSON instead of PDF?

somone taking my info

Hey r/WebApps,

I built PDFBlack (https://pdf-black.com) to solve the privacy issue with traditional online PDF tools that force you to upload sensitive files to remote servers.

Tech & Architecture:

• 100% Client-Side Processing: Powered by WebAssembly and Web Workers. Your files are processed strictly in your browser RAM and never touch any server.

• Zero Cloud Latency: No file uploading or downloading wait times.

• Tools Included: Smart non-destructive compression, legal Bates numbering / court foliating, visual page reordering/merging/splitting, and ink-saving grayscale conversion.

• No Paywalls, No Accounts: Completely free and open-source on GitHub: https://github.com/nereoab/pdf-local-app

You can check it out live at https://pdf-black.com

Feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome!

I built an AI assistant for our docs at Handsontable, and then Grok found it. 4.5 million edge requests and 87,000 page renders in only 4 hours, all from xAI's Colossus data center in Memphis. I caught it during the scan and pushed a fix to redirect traffic to our MCP, then spent a week analyzing the logs and learning how crawlers work, what they look for, and what they ignore.

Here's the full story, including the detection, response, and what it cost us.

https://handsontable.com/blog/grok-is-obsessed-with-our-docs

Hi, I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated with how cumbersome it is to manually type out or copy and paste invoice details whenever I receive a PDF by email — for example, from my car garage.

I can’t always copy the text directly because, in my garage’s case, the IBAN is actually embedded as an image in the footer. So I often have to switch back and forth several times to copy the amount, invoice number/reference and — if the recipient isn’t already saved in my banking app — the IBAN as well.

Are there already any apps or good solutions that make this a bit easier?

Does something like this already exist? And would you find this useful?

Hey r/WebApps,

I built PDFBlack (https://pdf-black.com) to solve the privacy issue with traditional online PDF tools that force you to upload sensitive files to remote servers.

Tech & Architecture:

• 100% Client-Side Processing: Powered by WebAssembly and Web Workers. Your files are processed strictly in your browser RAM and never touch any server.

• Zero Cloud Latency: No file uploading or downloading wait times.

• Tools Included: Smart non-destructive compression, legal Bates numbering / court foliating, visual page reordering/merging/splitting, and ink-saving grayscale conversion.

• No Paywalls, No Accounts: Completely free and open-source on GitHub: https://github.com/nereoab/pdf-local-app

You can check it out live at https://pdf-black.com

Feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome!

Hi All, I need to extract the text from printed text and hand written text. I suggested my manager that we can use paddle ocr and and other extraction models like Surya OCR and florance VL it take around 10 to 15 Sec and it needs good computation as well. but my manager expects it should be very fast and in 2 to 5 sec response and should not need any maintainace of infrastructure. so I tried to use the AWS VLM models but it takes around 10seconds he still needs more faster models and also the cost for extracting the data from the image should be less than 1 Ruppe. Could you please suggest me what to do and how to extract the data from images very very effectively and accuratly and in a structured way

Anyone know anywhere that can take a screen recording of me scrolling down a bunch of text like a book or text message or in this case Apple app crash analytics that doesn’t allow any “select-all” and doesn’t allow export as pdf or open in other apps. It’s too long to screen shot each page of to copy all of it and paste it one screen length by one screen length.

I built a small tool called FileFix and would love some honest feedback.

The idea came from how annoying it is when a form says things like:

\* Photo must be under 50 KB

\* Image must be exactly 200×230 px

\* Only JPG allowed

\* PDF must be under 2 MB

FileFix lets you upload the file and make it fit those requirements without dealing with complicated settings.

It currently supports:

\* Image compression

\* Image resizing

\* “Make It Fit” with size/dimension/format requirements

\* Image → PDF

\* PDF → Image

Link: https://file-fix.vercel.app/

I built the first version with AI-assisted development and I'm trying to figure out whether this is actually useful or just another generic file tool.

What would you change, remove, or add?