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Generate Professional PDF, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint Documents with AI

Cowrie
Cowrie
Dev @ Bswen

I spent hours manually formatting documents until I discovered MiniMax Skills. The generic templates looked unprofessional, form filling required manual intervention, and converting between formats kept breaking my layouts. Here’s how four document generation skills solved these problems.

The Document Generation Problem

Every project I work on eventually needs documents. Reports, proposals, data exports, presentations. The typical workflow looks like:

  1. Find a template online
  2. Manually fill in the content
  3. Struggle with formatting inconsistencies
  4. Export to PDF and notice the layout broke
  5. Start over

The core issues: generic templates look unprofessional, form filling needs manual work, format conversions lose styling, and maintaining consistency across documents is tedious.

minimax-pdf: Professional PDFs from Scratch

The minimax-pdf skill generates polished PDFs with 15 cover styles and a design token system. It handles three workflows: CREATE, FILL, and REFORMAT.

Creating a PDF

generate-pdf.sh
# Create a proposal with custom styling
bash scripts/make.sh run \
  --title "Q3 Strategy Review" \
  --type proposal \
  --author "Strategy Team" \
  --date "October 2025" \
  --accent "#2D5F8A" \
  --content content.json \
  --out report.pdf

The content is defined in JSON with typed blocks:

content.json
[
  {"type": "h1", "text": "Executive Summary"},
  {"type": "body", "text": "This report covers Q3 performance..."},
  {"type": "bullet", "text": "Revenue increased 15%"},
  {"type": "chart", "chart_type": "bar", "labels": ["Q1", "Q2", "Q3"],
   "datasets": [{"label": "Revenue", "values": [120, 145, 178]}]}
]

Cover Styles

The skill offers 15 cover patterns organized into categories:

cover-styles.txt
Professional:    report, proposal, resume, portfolio, academic
Minimalist:      minimal, stripe, diagonal, frame, editorial
Creative:        magazine, darkroom, terminal, poster

Accent Color Selection

Design tokens derive colors and typography from the document type. You can override with custom accents:

accent-colors.sh
--accent "#2D5F8A"  # Technology/engineering
--accent "#2A6B5A"  # Healthcare/medical
--accent "#6B2A35"  # Creative/arts

Form Filling

For existing PDF forms, the skill inspects and fills fields:

fill-form.sh
# Inspect form fields
python3 scripts/fill_inspect.py --input form.pdf


# Fill form fields
python3 scripts/fill_write.py --input form.pdf --out filled.pdf \
  --values '{"FirstName": "Jane", "Agree": "true", "Country": "US"}'

The CREATE pipeline runs through these scripts:

pdf-pipeline.txt
palette.py → cover.py → render_cover.js → render_body.py → merge.py

Each step handles a specific concern: color extraction, cover generation, body rendering, and final assembly.

minimax-xlsx: Excel Without Format Loss

The minimax-xlsx skill creates, reads, and edits Excel files. The key feature: zero format loss when editing existing files.

excel-workflow.py
import pandas as pd


# Read and analyze
df = pd.read_excel("data.xlsx")
analysis = df.describe()


# Edit with format preservation
# Uses openpyxl in read+write mode
# Formula recalculation supported

The skill supports multiple formats:

excel-formats.txt
XLSX  - Standard Excel format
XLSM  - Macro-enabled workbooks
CSV   - Comma-separated values
TSV   - Tab-separated values

I tried editing a financial model with complex conditional formatting. Most tools broke the styling. minimax-xlsx preserved everything—cell colors, borders, number formats, and formulas recalculated correctly.

minimax-docx: Word Documents with OpenXML

The minimax-docx skill uses the OpenXML SDK (.NET) for Word document generation. It supports tracked changes, comments, and formatting preservation.

Three pipelines handle different use cases:

docx-pipelines.txt
CREATE   → Generate new documents from scratch
FILL     → Insert content into template documents
EDIT     → Modify existing documents with XSD validation

The OpenXML approach means reliable handling of:

  • Tracked changes and revision history
  • Comments and annotations
  • Complex formatting inheritance
  • Template schema validation

pptx-generator: PowerPoint Presentations

The pptx-generator skill creates presentations using PptxGenJS. It builds slide types programmatically:

pptx-generation.js
const pptx = new PptxGenJS();


// Cover slide
let slide = pptx.addSlide();
slide.addText("Q3 Strategy Review", {
  x: 0.5, y: 2.5, w: 9, h: 1,
  fontSize: 44, bold: true
});


// Content slide
slide = pptx.addSlide();
slide.addText("Key Findings", { x: 0.5, y: 0.5, fontSize: 32 });
slide.addBulletPoint("Revenue up 15%", { x: 1, y: 1.5 });


pptx.writeFile({ fileName: "report.pptx" });

Supported slide types:

slide-types.txt
Cover slides       → Title, subtitle, author, date
Table of contents  → Auto-generated from sections
Content slides      → Bullet points, text, images
Section dividers    → Break between topics
Summary slides      → Key takeaways

The skill also extracts text from existing PPTX files using markitdown for content reuse.

Comparison Table

Here’s how the four skills compare:

skill-comparison.txt
| Skill         | Formats              | Key Capability                    |
|---------------|----------------------|-----------------------------------|
| minimax-pdf   | PDF                  | 15 cover styles, design tokens    |
| minimax-xlsx   | XLSX, XLSM, CSV, TSV | Zero format loss editing          |
| minimax-docx   | DOCX                 | OpenXML SDK, tracked changes      |
| pptx-generator | PPTX                 | Programmatic slide creation        |

Each skill handles CREATE, FILL, and EDIT workflows. The PDF skill adds REFORMAT for applying new designs to existing content.

Content Block Types in minimax-pdf

The PDF skill supports these content blocks:

content-blocks.txt
Headings:    h1, h2, h3
Text:        body, bullet, numbered
Media:       image, figure, code
Data:        table, chart
Special:     callout, math, flowchart, bibliography, divider

This block system means I can define document structure without worrying about visual styling—the design tokens handle that automatically.

Real Workflow

I used these skills to automate a quarterly reporting pipeline:

  1. minimax-xlsx reads raw data from multiple Excel sources
  2. Analysis scripts process the data
  3. pptx-generator creates a presentation deck
  4. minimax-pdf generates a formal written report
  5. minimax-docx produces an executive summary

The entire process runs without manual intervention. Before, this took half a day. Now it’s a single script.

Final Words + More Resources

My intention with this article was to help others share my knowledge and experience. If you want to contact me, you can contact by email: Email me

Here are also the most important links from this article along with some further resources that will help you in this scope:

Oh, and if you found these resources useful, don’t forget to support me by starring the repo on GitHub!

In this post, I covered four MiniMax Skills for document generation: minimax-pdf for professional PDFs with 15 cover styles, minimax-xlsx for Excel processing with zero format loss, minimax-docx for Word documents using OpenXML, and pptx-generator for PowerPoint creation. Each handles CREATE, FILL, and EDIT workflows, making it possible to automate the complete document lifecycle without manual formatting work.

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