Styled MS Office Viewer 2.1.1

Styled MS Office Viewer 2.1.1

Read Microsoft Office and OpenDocument files inside Obsidian with the styling they were saved with. Workbooks keep their fills, fonts, borders, merged cells and frozen panes; Word documents are laid out as pages; presentations open as slides with a thumbnail rail, a slideshow mode and speaker notes. Strictly read only: the plugin never writes to your documents.

Supports .xlsx .xlsm .xltx .xltm .csv .tsv .ods .docx .docm .dotx .dotm .odt .rtf .doc .pptx .pptm .ppsx .ppsm .potx .potm .odp. Requires Obsidian 1.5.0 or newer. Desktop and mobile.

Release assets are built and attested by GitHub Actions. Verify a downloaded main.js with:

gh attestation verify main.js --repo zoroaster1x/Styled-MS-Office-Viewer-for-Obsidian

Changes since 2.1.0

• Release 2.1.1 with the CI release pathway [release] 2.1.1
• Fix Word shape placement, section pages and header margins

Install

1. Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the assets below.
2. Put them in <Vault>/.obsidian/plugins/styled-ms-office-viewer/.
3. In Obsidian: Settings, Community plugins, reload the installed plugins, enable Styled MS Office Viewer.

Documentation

Formats, settings, benchmarks and the honest known limits live in the README.

Funding

If this plugin saves you time, consider supporting its development. Every contribution goes toward maintenance, new format coverage and the long tail of edge cases that make real documents painful to render.

Monero (XMR):

8BdxmQSniku4dBJXWPXeXvgjztmj5nmvWQqeCrVvCtYciusbAyo4rqrGCefTfQ4gGaVZmLN7VgLiYUYyBdYFEwHn1UWPjWs

Tip: You can easily purchase Litecoin using Cake Wallet and then, within the app, create a Monero wallet and exchange the Litecoin into it, pointed at the address above.

Crypto isn't your thing? Starring the repository, filing clear bug reports with a sample file, and telling other Obsidian users about the plugin all help just as much.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later. Copyright (C) 2026 Zoroaster1x.

2.1.0

Performance

Word documents open windowed. Only the pages near the viewport carry DOM, and pages far away give theirs back. An 11.1 MB, 36 page manual draws its first page in about 200-300 ms instead of 1.0-1.4 s (render 684-934 ms to 24-88 ms; DOM nodes 3924 to 612). On by default; the new Windowed page rendering setting turns it off.

Pictures decode when a page is drawn, not when the file is parsed. A parse no longer transcodes every EMF, WMF, TIFF or JPEG XR in the document: an 8.8 MB handbook parses in 165-214 ms instead of 550-650 ms.

XML traversal caches the stripped tag name and the local-name attribute map per element. The same manual parses in about 130 ms instead of about 250 ms.

Package parts inflate on first use, and the view pre-inflates the XML parts in parallel with the platform decompressor while the first frame paints. Opening the package itself costs under a millisecond.

Decoded media is cached across documents (TIFF, JPEG XR, EMF, WMF) by content, so scrolling back to a diagram or reopening a file is instant.

Pixels become a PNG through Chromium's canvas encoder where the host has one: a 9.8 MB deck draws its first slide in about 320 ms instead of about 640 ms, and a warm render takes about 10 ms.

Pagination measures through one shared canvas and cache, caches each block's metrics, and waits for the first frame before reporting the page. The document line height now matches the planner (1.18), so planned and drawn pages agree.

Word

Legacy VML shapes (w:pict) are placed the way Word places them. A text-relative box reserves its height in the anchor paragraph and steps down the page, square wrap floats beside the text, page-relative boxes sit on the page, and a file's negative z-index stays behind the text instead of vanishing under the white page. The equation sheet draws as a readable column of boxes with all of its equations.

Also in 2.0.3, for anyone upgrading from 2.0.2

• Word drawing groups (wpg): pictures, text boxes, preset silhouettes, freeform paths, connectors and their text
• Standalone anchored shapes that carry no text box
• Tab stops: left, centre and right, with leaders
• Live PAGE and NUMPAGES fields; page breaks; keepNext; per-section headers and footers with titlePg and evenAndOddHeaders
• Table grid spans, vertical merges, cell margins, table style conditionals and banded rows
• Nested smartTag and sdt wrappers; Symbol, Wingdings and Webdings w:sym glyphs; embedded object placeholders
• VML shapes, groups, lines, text boxes and pictures (first round)
• A live page indicator in the toolbar; zoom keeps the current page
• New synthetic suites: drawing, vml and virtual-docx

Verification

• 21 synthetic suites pass
• Text fidelity over 396 documents: 396 pass, 0 fail
• Parse and render over 397 documents with full rendering: 0 failures, 33.6 s
• The lecture library and the vault were compared against headless LibreOffice references

Install: copy main.js, manifest.json and styles.css into <Vault>/.obsidian/plugins/styled-ms-office-viewer/ and enable the plugin in Settings, Community plugins.

2.0.3

Styled MS Office Viewer, read only Office and OpenDocument viewing
inside Obsidian.

Open .xlsx, .xlsm, .xltx, .xltm, .csv, .tsv, .ods, .docx, .docm,
.dotx, .dotm, .odt, .rtf, .doc, .pptx, .pptm, .ppsx, .ppsm, .potx,
.potm and .odp and read them with their real styling: a styled
grid, paginated documents, and slides with a thumbnail rail and a
slideshow mode.

Install: copy main.js, manifest.json and styles.css into
/.obsidian/plugins/styled-ms-office-viewer/ and enable the
plugin in Settings, Community plugins.

2.0.2

Styled MS Office Viewer, read only Office and OpenDocument viewing
inside Obsidian.

Open .xlsx, .xlsm, .xltx, .xltm, .csv, .tsv, .ods, .docx, .docm,
.dotx, .dotm, .odt, .rtf, .doc, .pptx, .pptm, .ppsx, .ppsm, .potx,
.potm and .odp and read them with their real styling: a styled
grid, paginated documents, and slides with a thumbnail rail and a
slideshow mode.

Install: copy main.js, manifest.json and styles.css into
/.obsidian/plugins/styled-ms-office-viewer/ and enable the
plugin in Settings, Community plugins.

2.0.1

Styled MS Office Viewer, read only Office and OpenDocument viewing
inside Obsidian.

Open .xlsx, .xlsm, .xltx, .xltm, .csv, .tsv, .ods, .docx, .docm,
.dotx, .dotm, .odt, .rtf, .doc, .pptx, .pptm, .ppsx, .ppsm, .potx,
.potm and .odp and read them with their real styling: a styled
grid, paginated documents, and slides with a thumbnail rail and a
slideshow mode.

Install: copy main.js, manifest.json and styles.css into
/.obsidian/plugins/styled-ms-office-viewer/ and enable the
plugin in Settings, Community plugins.

2.0.0

Styled MS Office Viewer 2.0.0