OOXML Viewer for VS Code
A high-fidelity viewer for .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx files — powered by a Rust/WASM parser and an HTML Canvas renderer.
Private by design. All parsing and rendering happens locally inside the VS Code Webview via WebAssembly. No file contents, no metadata, and no telemetry leave your machine. The extension makes no network requests.
Screenshots
Features
- DOCX — Continuous scroll view of every page with a transparent text layer (PDF.js-style) — drag to select, copy as plain text.
- XLSX — Spreadsheet viewer with cell / row / column / range selection, tab-separated copy (Ctrl+C / Cmd+C), freeze-pane support, and a multi-sheet tab bar.
- PPTX — Continuous scroll view of every slide with a transparent text layer that handles rotated text boxes correctly.
- Theme-aware — Background and foreground follow the active VS Code theme (light / dark / high-contrast).
- High fidelity — Charts, conditional formatting, theme colors, custom geometry shapes, and more rendered straight from the OOXML spec.
All three formats share the same Rust parser (wasm-pack) for accuracy and speed.
Usage
Open any .docx, .xlsx, or .pptx file in VS Code — the OOXML Viewer takes over as the default editor for those file types.
If a different editor opens by default, right-click the file → Reopen Editor With… → select OOXML Viewer, then optionally Configure default editor to make it the default.
Selection & copy
- DOCX / PPTX — Drag across rendered text to select, then Ctrl+C / Cmd+C to copy as plain text. The transparent overlay matches the canvas glyph positions, so selection feels native. (This dual-layer rendering is planned to be unified once the Canvas
drawElement API ships across browsers.)
- XLSX — Click a cell to select it, drag for a range, click row/column headers for full-row/column selection, click the corner box for sheet-wide selection. Ctrl+C / Cmd+C copies as TSV.
Privacy & Security
- Zero network access. The Webview's Content Security Policy disallows outbound connections to any origin other than the extension itself. There is no analytics, no font CDN, no remote API.
- Local file I/O only. The extension reads bytes via
vscode.workspace.fs.readFile and never writes back — files are opened read-only.
- Open source. Source code at github.com/yukiyokotani/office-open-xml-viewer.
VS Code's own telemetry is independent of this extension and can be controlled via the telemetry.telemetryLevel setting.
Known Limitations
- XLSX: formula evaluation is not yet supported (raw cached values are shown).
- DOCX: image-anchored float wrap, footnotes, and header/footer rendering may differ slightly from Word.
- PPTX: a small number of obscure preset shapes fall back to a rectangle placeholder.
- Media playback (audio / video) is not supported in the Webview.
Issues & Contributions
Report bugs or request features at github.com/yukiyokotani/office-open-xml-viewer/issues.
License
MIT
