From Task to Tutorial: An Automated GUI Framework for Excel Tutorial Document and Video Creation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xie, Yuhang, Mu, Jian, Ma, Xiaojun, Zhang, Chaoyun, Wang, Lu, Zhou, Mengyu, Liu, Mugeng, Qin, Si, Lin, Qingwei, Rajmohan, Saravan, Han, Shi, Zhang, Dongmei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Xie, Yuhang
Mu, Jian
Ma, Xiaojun
Zhang, Chaoyun
Wang, Lu
Zhou, Mengyu
Liu, Mugeng
Qin, Si
Lin, Qingwei
Rajmohan, Saravan
Han, Shi
Zhang, Dongmei
author_facet Xie, Yuhang
Mu, Jian
Ma, Xiaojun
Zhang, Chaoyun
Wang, Lu
Zhou, Mengyu
Liu, Mugeng
Qin, Si
Lin, Qingwei
Rajmohan, Saravan
Han, Shi
Zhang, Dongmei
contents Excel is one of the most widely used productivity tools across domains, offering rich functionality but also overwhelming users with its complexity. This creates a persistent demand for tutorials to support effective usage. However, while building and maintaining the Microsoft tutorial corpus, we observed that existing tutorials are manually created by experts, need frequent updates with each software release, and involve substantial human labor. Moreover, prior work has not achieved fully automated tutorial generation. In this paper, we present the first framework for automatically generating Excel tutorials directly from natural language task descriptions. Our framework first instantiates the task. Then a central component of this framework, Execution Agent, plans and executes the solution in Excel, and collects the intermediate artifacts required for tutorial construction. These artifacts are then transformed into both structured Excel documents and video demonstrations. To build a comprehensive tutorial corpus, we collected 1,559 task descriptions from real-world scenarios. In addition, we designed a systematic evaluation framework that integrates assessments from both large language models (LLMs) and human reviewers. Experimental results show that our framework improves task execution success rates by 8.5% over state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, the generated tutorials demonstrate superior readability and instructional effectiveness, often approaching or surpassing expert-authored materials. Importantly, the automated pipeline eliminates manual labor and reduces time costs to 1/20 of expert authoring, making scalable and high-quality tutorial generation practical for the first time.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_21816
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Task to Tutorial: An Automated GUI Framework for Excel Tutorial Document and Video Creation
Xie, Yuhang
Mu, Jian
Ma, Xiaojun
Zhang, Chaoyun
Wang, Lu
Zhou, Mengyu
Liu, Mugeng
Qin, Si
Lin, Qingwei
Rajmohan, Saravan
Han, Shi
Zhang, Dongmei
Software Engineering
Excel is one of the most widely used productivity tools across domains, offering rich functionality but also overwhelming users with its complexity. This creates a persistent demand for tutorials to support effective usage. However, while building and maintaining the Microsoft tutorial corpus, we observed that existing tutorials are manually created by experts, need frequent updates with each software release, and involve substantial human labor. Moreover, prior work has not achieved fully automated tutorial generation. In this paper, we present the first framework for automatically generating Excel tutorials directly from natural language task descriptions. Our framework first instantiates the task. Then a central component of this framework, Execution Agent, plans and executes the solution in Excel, and collects the intermediate artifacts required for tutorial construction. These artifacts are then transformed into both structured Excel documents and video demonstrations. To build a comprehensive tutorial corpus, we collected 1,559 task descriptions from real-world scenarios. In addition, we designed a systematic evaluation framework that integrates assessments from both large language models (LLMs) and human reviewers. Experimental results show that our framework improves task execution success rates by 8.5% over state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, the generated tutorials demonstrate superior readability and instructional effectiveness, often approaching or surpassing expert-authored materials. Importantly, the automated pipeline eliminates manual labor and reduces time costs to 1/20 of expert authoring, making scalable and high-quality tutorial generation practical for the first time.
title From Task to Tutorial: An Automated GUI Framework for Excel Tutorial Document and Video Creation
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21816