Comprehensive document creation, editing, and analysis with support for tracked changes, comments, formatting preservation, and text extraction. When Claude needs to work with professional documents (.docx files) for: (1) Creating new documents, (2) Modifying or editing content, (3) Working with tracked changes, (4) Adding comments, or any other document tasks
name docx description Comprehensive document creation, editing, and analysis with support for tracked changes, comments, formatting preservation, and text extraction. When Claude needs to work with professional documents (.docx files) for: (1) Creating new documents, (2) Modifying or editing content, (3) Working with tracked changes, (4) Adding comments, or any other document tasks license Proprietary. LICENSE.txt has complete terms DOCX creation, editing, and analysis Overview A user may ask you to create, edit, or analyze the contents of a .docx file. A .docx file is essentially a ZIP archive containing XML files and other resources that you can read or edit. You have different tools and workflows available for different tasks. Workflow Decision Tree Reading/Analyzing Content Use "Text extraction" or "Raw XML access" sections below Creating New Document Use "Creating a new Word document" workflow Editing Existing Document Your own document + simple changes Use "Basic OOXML editing" workflow Someone else's document Use "Redlining workflow" (recommended default) Legal, academic, business, or government docs Use "Redlining workflow" (required) Reading and analyzing content Text extraction If you just need to read the text contents of a document, you should convert the document to markdown using pandoc. Pandoc provides excellent support for preserving document structure and can show tracked changes:
pandoc --track-changes=all path-to-file.docx -o output.md
Raw XML access You need raw XML access for: comments, complex formatting, document structure, embedded media, and metadata. For any of these features, you'll need to unpack a document and read its raw XML contents. Unpacking a file python ooxml/scripts/unpack.py <office_file> <output_directory> Key file structures word/document.xml
'<w:del><w:r><w:delText>The term is 30 days.</w:delText></w:r></w:del><w:ins><w:r><w:t>The term is 60 days.</w:t></w:r></w:ins>'
'<w:r w:rsidR="00AB12CD"><w:t>The term is </w:t></w:r><w:del><w:r><w:delText>30</w:delText></w:r></w:del><w:ins><w:r><w:t>60</w:t></w:r></w:ins><w:r w:rsidR="00AB12CD"><w:t> days.</w:t></w:r>' Tracked changes workflow Get markdown representation : Convert document to markdown with tracked changes preserved: pandoc --track-changes=all path-to-file.docx -o current.md Identify and group changes : Review the document and identify ALL changes needed, organizing them into logical batches: Location methods (for finding changes in XML): Section/heading numbers (e.g., "Section 3.2", "Article IV") Paragraph identifiers if numbered Grep patterns with unique surrounding text Document structure (e.g., "first paragraph", "signature block") DO NOT use markdown line numbers
grep "replacement phrase" verification.md
Check that no unintended changes were introduced Converting Documents to Images To visually analyze Word documents, convert them to images using a two-step process: Convert DOCX to PDF : soffice --headless --convert-to pdf document.docx Convert PDF pages to JPEG images : pdftoppm -jpeg -r 150 document.pdf page This creates files like page-1.jpg , page-2.jpg , etc. Options: -r 150 : Sets resolution to 150 DPI (adjust for quality/size balance) -jpeg : Output JPEG format (use -png for PNG if preferred) -f N : First page to convert (e.g., -f 2 starts from page 2) -l N : Last page to convert (e.g., -l 5 stops at page 5) page : Prefix for output files Example for specific range: pdftoppm -jpeg -r 150 -f 2 -l 5 document.pdf page
Code Style Guidelines IMPORTANT : When generating code for DOCX operations: Write concise code Avoid verbose variable names and redundant operations Avoid unnecessary print statements Dependencies Required dependencies (install if not available): pandoc : sudo apt-get install pandoc (for text extraction) docx : npm install -g docx (for creating new documents) LibreOffice : sudo apt-get install libreoffice (for PDF conversion) Poppler : sudo apt-get install poppler-utils (for pdftoppm to convert PDF to images) defusedxml : pip install defusedxml (for secure XML parsing)