Example · Spreadsheet to PDF

One soffice command, two IRRs: 44,884.78% or NM

Convert a public financial model to PDF with headless LibreOffice and you get a management IRR of 44,884.78%. The Microsoft Excel value for the same cell is NM. Run the identical command with Wolf installed as soffice and you get NM.

ONE PUBLIC WORKBOOK·2,380 FORMULAS, NO CACHED VALUES·SAME SOFFICE COMMAND LINE·REPRODUCIBLE

Management IRR, cell RETURNS!I44

LibreOffice PDF crop: the Returns to Management heading at the bottom of page 14, then on page 15 the rows IRR 44,884.78%, MOIC 0.00x ; (0.00x) ; – ; NM, and Cash Gain. — Heading on page 14, rows on page 15 of 54.

Wolf PDF crop: the Returns to Management labels IRR, MOIC, and Cash Gain from page 19, beside their values from page 22: NM, NM, and the cash gain. — Labels on page 19, values on page 22 of 57.

Reference: Microsoft ExcelNMSame workbook bytes, from an earlier native capture.²

Extracted text for a downstream pipeline

Teams that index spreadsheets for search or an AI model often convert XLSX to PDF with soffice and then extract the text. These are the management rows of each PDF, extracted with pdftotext -layout.¹

libreoffice.txt · 54 pages

# page 14
Returns to Management
# page 15
IRR    44,884.78%
MOIC    0.00x ; (0.00x) ; – ; NM
Cash Gain    $492.1

wolf.txt · 57 pages

# page 19
Returns to Management
IRR
MOIC
Cash Gain
# page 22
    NM
    NM
    $492.1

The four formula cells under the management and revolver returns, located in each PDF:³

Values of four RETURNS cells in Microsoft Excel and in each converter's PDF
Cell	Microsoft Excel	LibreOffice 26.8.0.3 PDF	Wolf 0.2.17 PDF
RETURNS!I44Management IRR	NM	44,884.78% (page 15)	NM (page 22)
RETURNS!I45Management MOIC	NM	0.00x ; (0.00x) ; – ; NM (page 15)	NM (page 22)
RETURNS!I125Revolver IRR	NM	### (page 16)	NM (page 24)
RETURNS!I126Revolver MOIC	NM	0.00x ; (0.00x) ; – ; NM (page 16)	NM (page 24)

Why the values differ

The workbook holds 2,380 formulas, and 2,380 of them have no cached value. Every formula has to be calculated by the converter before the sheet can be printed. The render report from the Wolf run includes that warning: 2380 formula cell(s) had no cached value LibreOffice would use and were calculated on load; the other formula cells keep their cached values.

Cell I44 is =IFERROR(XIRR(I40:N40,I30:N30),"NM"). In the recalculated copies from both engines, its cash flows in I40:N40 are 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 and 492.1, dated December 31 of each year from 2024 to 2029. With no negative cash flow, there is no rate at which their net present value is zero, so the IRR is undefined.⁴

Microsoft Excel: the cell value is NM. XIRR has no result for these flows, so the IFERROR fallback is used.
LibreOffice: the cell value is 448.847829244812, formatted in the PDF as 44,884.78%.
Wolf: the cell value is NM, the same as Excel.

The revolver IRR in I125 has the same shape: cash flows of 0, 1.25, 1.25, 1.25, 1.25, 1.25, none negative. Its LibreOffice value is 41072487891.0192, too wide for its column, so the PDF cell holds ###. The MOIC cells I45 and I126 are NM in both engines; in the LibreOffice PDF their text is the number format pattern itself, 0.00x ; (0.00x) ; – ; NM.

If you shell out to soffice to turn spreadsheets into PDF or text for search, retrieval, or an AI model, 44,884.78% is the management IRR you index from this file.

Reproduce it

You need LibreOffice, poppler's pdftotext, and the wolf binary from Wolf Runtime. Each binary is linked as soffice in its own directory, and PATH is the only difference between the two runs.⁵

reproduce.sh

# SOFFICE_BIN: your LibreOffice soffice. WOLF_BIN: the wolf binary.
curl -LO https://github.com/user-attachments/files/20989007/Project.Mosaic.2025-6-26.xlsx
shasum -a 256 Project.Mosaic.2025-6-26.xlsx   # e46fd7ed99b6aee1ecd04d2781a7f036e35c7f9f117b169aaf0ce16652c46c87
mkdir bin-libreoffice bin-wolf
ln -s "$SOFFICE_BIN" bin-libreoffice/soffice
ln -s "$WOLF_BIN" bin-wolf/soffice
for arm in libreoffice wolf; do
  rm -rf profile out
  env PATH="$PWD/bin-$arm:/usr/bin:/bin" soffice -env:UserInstallation="file://$PWD/profile" \
    --headless --invisible --convert-to pdf --outdir out Project.Mosaic.2025-6-26.xlsx
  pdftotext -layout out/Project.Mosaic.2025-6-26.pdf "$arm.txt"
done
grep -c '44,884.78%' libreoffice.txt wolf.txt

Expect a count of 1 for libreoffice.txt and 0 for wolf.txt.

Where to go next

Try Wolf on your own workbooks with Wolf Runtime, or read how a headless LibreOffice step can be replaced.

Explore Wolf Runtime Replace headless LibreOffice