Edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, and preview the result inline

Shannon can now edit a Word document, an Excel workbook, or a PowerPoint deck directly (add a row, fix a formula, add a slide) and hand back a new version for you to review, the same way it already does with a text file. Reviewing that change used to mean downloading the result and opening it in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint just to see what happened; now the file renders inline, so you can look at the page or sheet itself before you decide whether to keep it.

This is Files form the foundation applied to the formats you work in every day: the agent doesn’t describe an edit in chat and leave you to go make it, it makes the edit, and the document in front of you is the deliverable. That was already true for text files. It’s now true for the spreadsheets, docs, and decks that make up most of what actually gets worked on.

Ask for the edit you’d normally make by hand

Tell Shannon to add a Q4 forecast row to a workbook, fix the formula in a specific cell, or add a slide summarizing an analysis, and it edits the file itself rather than describing what you should change. The result saves as a new version of the file, not an overwrite: the original stays intact until you accept the change. Because there’s no line-by-line diff for a binary file the way there is for text, the review card is a short, agent-written summary of what moved — which sheet, which cells, which slide — next to Accept and Reject buttons.

Accept makes that version current; reject discards it and the original is untouched.

The one gap today: accept and reject apply to the whole version, so you can’t keep half a spreadsheet’s changes and toss the rest.

See the change before you download it

Open a pending or accepted Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file and Shannon renders it inline the first time you look, no download required. This covers all three formats, including PowerPoint, which has never had a solid way to preview a slide deck in a browser without opening the desktop app. If a file fails to render, you still fall back to downloading and opening it locally — you’re never blocked from seeing the result, just from seeing it without leaving the workspace.

Under the hood

The agent’s edits run in a sandboxed code-execution environment already stocked with Python and the Office-format libraries: openpyxl for spreadsheets, python-docx and python-pptx for documents and decks. It also has LibreOffice, which handles preview: the first time you open a file, the same server converts the result to a PDF, caches that render against the specific version, and serves it through the workspace’s existing PDF viewer. I built the preview this way on purpose: it’s the same rendering approach Shannon already uses for diagrams, pointed at a different converter, instead of a separate previewer per format.

Try it: open a Word doc, an Excel sheet, or a slide deck already in your workspace and ask for the change you’d normally make by hand.