Documents
Creating and editing Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files, the document editor, and presentations in your corporate template
Cowork does not write "a text file that looks like a Word document". It produces real Office files on your device, and it edits existing ones in place without flattening their formatting.
Creating a document
Ask for it in plain words: "make me an Excel file with one sheet per region", "write this up as a Word document", "turn the notes into a five-slide deck", "export the summary as a PDF".
| Format | What the assistant fills in |
|---|---|
| Excel | One or more sheets with rows and formulas |
| Word | Headings, paragraphs, lists |
| PowerPoint | Slides with title, subtitle, bullets |
| The same block structure as Word, written straight to PDF |
The file is written locally through the same checks as any other write: inside a shared folder, atomically, and only overwriting an existing file if that was the intent. Nothing is uploaded.
Plain text, Markdown and CSV are written as plain files, not as Office documents.
Editing an existing document
This is the important half. Editing goes in place and keeps the formatting.
| Format | How an edit is expressed |
|---|---|
| Excel | Per cell: B3 gets a new value. Other cells, formulas and formatting stay untouched |
| Word | Search and replace in the text. The paragraph keeps its styling, even when the formatting changes mid-sentence |
| PowerPoint | Search and replace in the text of a slide |
| Existing text is replaced in place, and the layout stays |
Rewriting a document from scratch is not the same as editing it. Asking for "the file again but with the new figures" produces a new file without the old formatting. Asking to "correct the figures in cell C7 and C9" edits it. Say which you want.
PDF limits worth knowing
Text replacement in a PDF has real, visible limits, and the assistant is instructed to tell you before it starts:
- Only existing text is replaced. Nothing can be inserted where there was no text.
- Characters the embedded font does not contain simply do not appear.
- Noticeably longer replacement text runs past the margin.
If the PDF is a fillable form, fields are the right way in. A form field carries its own rendering, so there are no font or margin limits at all. The field names come out of the document when it is read, listed under "form fields".
Whole-page operations are separate from content: delete pages, reorder them, rotate them, or append the pages of another PDF. The pages themselves travel unchanged. What that costs is stated up front: reordering rebuilds the file and does not keep form fields, annotations, links or bookmarks; appending does not carry over the form fields, annotations and links of the appended files; and copy protection is removed when the file is saved.
Presentations in your corporate template
If your organization has uploaded PowerPoint templates, the assistant can build a new presentation on one of them, so it comes out in the company's look without anyone reformatting slides afterwards.
Pick the template by name, or leave it to the default. Per slide there is one layout:
| Layout | For |
|---|---|
| Title | The opening slide |
| Title, bullets | The everyday content slide |
| Two column | Comparisons, before and after |
| Section header | A divider between parts |
| Quote | A pulled-out statement |
| Blank | Nothing prefilled |
Charts, tables, images and speaker notes are not available on this path, because they cannot be placed into a template layout reliably. For those, have the assistant build the deck without a template.
This is the only file operation that involves the server: the templates live there. Your content goes up as the slide plan, the finished file is written locally, and the template's own bytes never reach the model. If no templates are configured for you, the assistant says so instead of inventing a design.
The document editor
Click a document in the Files panel and it opens in an editor built for that format rather than as extracted text.
| Format | What you see |
|---|---|
| Word | One editable field per paragraph |
| PowerPoint | Grouped per slide |
| Excel | A grid with sheet tabs. A formula cell shows the formula, and is saved back as a formula |
| Starts in the real rendered view, with a switch to text editing | |
| PDF form | A third view with the fillable fields. This is the safe way to change a PDF |
| CSV, TSV | A grid, with a switch back to the raw text |
| Text, Markdown | The code editor, and Markdown has a rendered preview |
| Images, video | Rendered directly |
Save with the button in the header or with Cmd/Ctrl+S. A change made outside the app does not overwrite what you have open: while you have unsaved edits, you win.
Parts a format does not allow you to change, such as a signature field or a button in a PDF, are shown with a lock rather than silently dropped on save.
Formats without a preview
odt, ods, odp, the old doc, xls, ppt, and rtf have no preview here. The panel says so and offers Open with default application. The assistant can still read their text.
For some formats the file panel shows extracted text and refuses to save, and says why. That
is deliberate: for a scanned PDF, an .eml or an old .xls, the text you see is a readable
extraction, not the file. Saving it would replace the real document with its own summary. What can
genuinely be edited never lands there in the first place, it goes to the editor above.
Checking the result
For a presentation or a PDF, the assistant can render a single page or slide as an image and look at it. That is how it verifies a layout it just produced instead of editing blind. Word and Excel are not included, since they have no fixed page geometry.
If you want to be sure yourself, open the file in the editor: for PDF that is the real rendered view, and for a presentation it is the slide-by-slide view.