[esperent]

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.

[linuxrebe1]

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.

[bobim]

My take was on pictures embedded into those documents, I'm not sure screenshotting would help as the text/numeric data is already there. Just saying.