Editing Word Documents

Upload a Word document (.docx) to a workspace and open it: it opens in a Word-style editor right inside the Hub, with the usual toolbar for fonts, styles, lists, tables and images. Nothing is converted — you are editing the document itself, so what you save is a real .docx you can download and open in Word.

Editing

• It saves itself. A moment after you stop typing, your changes are saved to the document. The line above the page shows Unsaved changes, Saving… or All changes saved. Ctrl+S / Cmd+S saves straight away, and so does switching to another window.
• You need edit access. If you can view the document but not change it, it opens as View only.
• It matches your theme. The editor's toolbar and surroundings follow your light or dark mode and your chosen theme (Chalk, Paper, Dusk, Ledger, Atelier, Mono) from Customize › Appearance, and change with it. The document itself is never recoloured: the page stays white, with the text, logos, images and table shading exactly as the file's author made them, in light mode and in dark mode alike.
• More room. While a document is open, the left sidebar collapses and the Hub widens. The chat stays beside it — that is where you talk to the assistant. Closing the document restores your layout.

Asking the assistant to change it

With the document open, ask in the chat the way you would ask a colleague:

Update the Mixed Use scope to match a masterplan development, but keep the structure.

The assistant reads the document and changes the real text. Formatting is preserved — styles, tables, images, headers and footers are left as they were, and only the parts you asked about change. When it is done it says what it changed, and the page updates by itself.

Select text to say what you mean. Highlight a sentence or a section and a chip above the chat box shows Selected: "…". Your next message carries that text, so "make this more formal" or "shorten this" refers to exactly what you highlighted. Remove the chip to stop sending it.

What the assistant can do today:

• Rewrite, add or remove paragraphs and bullet points.
• Find and replace wording throughout the document, including headers and footers.
• Add a heading, or text in the same style as the paragraph it follows.
• Remove a table row, or a whole table.
• Place a picture on its own line, with a caption, in place of a placeholder such as "[Insert location plan]" (see below).

What it cannot do yet:

• Change character formatting — bold, italic, colour, font. Do that yourself in the editor.
• Show its changes as tracked changes to accept or reject. An edit goes straight into the document — but it can be undone (see below).

Pictures from a PDF

An RFP, a client brief or an emailed attachment often arrives as a PDF with its drawings inside. Save the PDF to a workspace, then ask for what you need:

Take the location plan and the masterplan from the RFP and put them in the Project Appreciation section, with captions.

Cosmo saves the pictures embedded in the PDF as separate image files in the same workspace (named like RFP - p17 (1).png, so you can see which page each came from), then places the ones you chose into the Word document. The picture keeps its proportions and is never wider than the page's text area.

Things to know:

• Only embedded pictures are extracted. A plan that the drawing tool exported as lines and fills, not as a picture, cannot be pulled out; Cosmo says so and you need to supply it as an image file.
• Repeats and small images are skipped. A logo in every page header is saved once, and icons and bullets are left out.
• Formats: PNG, JPEG and GIF can be placed in a Word file. A WebP or SVG image cannot.
• A whole scanned page is returned as one large picture; Cosmo tells you when a size looks like that.
• Like any assistant edit, placing a picture keeps a restore point, so "undo that" removes it.

Undoing the assistant

Before the assistant changes a document, Cosmo saves a restore point of it as it was. If you do not like a result:

• click Undo Cosmo's last edit above the page (it appears whenever there is something to undo), or
• tell the assistant to undo or revert the change.

Each undo steps back one edit, so you can click it again to go further back through edits the assistant made one after another. Cosmo keeps the last five restore points per document.

Undo never throws away your own work. Once the document has been saved after the assistant's edit — for example because you typed in it and it saved itself — undo is refused and nothing is changed, because putting the earlier version back would also remove what you added. Ask the assistant to change the specific text back instead.

Restore points are stored on your computer, not in the cloud, and are removed when you sign out. So an undo works on the computer where the assistant made the change, and cannot undo something you typed yourself — use the editor's own Undo (Ctrl+Z) for that. If Cosmo cannot save a restore point (for example, the disk is full), the assistant does not make the edit at all.

What the assistant will not do on its own

A paragraph that looks blank can still be doing work — holding spacing, or an image or text box positioned relative to it, as on a cover page. So the assistant:

• will not delete a paragraph that contains an image, text box, field or bookmark, and
• will not delete more than three paragraphs in one go without asking you first.

If you want a tidy-up of a document's spacing, tell the assistant exactly what to remove.

If you and the assistant both change the document

• You have no unsaved changes: the assistant's version simply appears, and the line above the page says Cosmo updated this document.
• You have unsaved changes: nothing is overwritten, and nothing is saved until you choose. A banner offers Load the new version (your unsaved changes are discarded) or Keep mine (your copy replaces the assistant's version straight away).
• You close the document while the banner is showing: your unsaved changes are kept as a separate document named “… (your unsaved edits).docx” in the same workspace, and the assistant's version is left as it is.

Keeping the original, and when an edit fails

• Edit in place is safe. Every assistant edit keeps a restore point, so asking it to change an attached file does not need a copy; say "undo that" to go back. If you want the original left untouched, ask for a copy and the assistant saves an exact duplicate (same formatting, images and headers) and edits that.
• The assistant never makes a Word file out of text. It edits the real file or copies it. If something goes wrong it reports which step failed and what it said, and retries once, rather than handing the job back to you.
• A change that matched nothing is reported. If you ask it to fill {{project_title}} and that text is not in the file, the reply says it was not found; it does not report the field as done.
• Placeholders are found everywhere — in the body, tables, text boxes, headers, footers and footnotes — even when Word has split the placeholder across several pieces of formatting.

Templates with form-like fields, and colouring text

Many templates fill their cover and letter fields through Word content controls that are bound to data stored inside the file. Word repaints such a control from that data every time the file opens, so changing only the text you can see does not stick. When you ask the assistant to fill a field, it changes both the control and the data behind it, and every other control bound to the same data (for example the title on the cover and in the letter heading) follows.

• It checks the result the way Word will show it. After each edit the assistant reports any placeholders (such as {{project_title}}) a reader would still see when opening the file, and will not call the file complete while any remain.
• It can show you the fields. Ask it to inspect the document to list each control, what it displays, and what it is bound to. A control whose text and data disagree is flagged.
• It can colour or style text. Ask for a colour (a hex value such as 95C420), bold, italic, underline, a highlight or a size on certain words. Only the look changes, never the words, and it works inside text boxes, tables, headers and footers.
• Every edit comes with a short report: what was changed and where (with a little text around each change), what already read as asked, and what could not be found.
• Document properties (title, subject) are updated only when a field in the document displays them, and Word will offer to update fields the next time the file is opened.

The assistant can also render the saved file to PDF and look for leftover placeholders. This needs LibreOffice installed on the computer, says so in its answer ("rendered with LibreOffice, not Word"), and is skipped when LibreOffice is not available.

Pages that look blank

The editor does not display everything Word can. The most common case is a designed cover or section-divider page whose title sits in a text box inside a group of shapes: the editor skips that whole group, so the page opens blank.

When that happens, a notice above the page lists what is not shown — for example "DC CAPABILITIES" — text in a shape (a cover or section page). Nothing is lost:

• the content is still in the file, unchanged, and you will see it in Word;
• saving from Cosmo keeps it exactly as it was;
• the assistant can still read and edit the text in those shapes, even though you cannot see it on screen.

Make an editor-friendly copy

For the cover and section-divider case you can have the pages shown. In the notice, choose Make an editor-friendly copy. Cosmo automatically creates and opens a new document next to this one, named … (editor view).docx, in which each text box has been lifted out of its shape group so the editor can display and edit it immediately.

• Your original is never changed — the copy is a separate document, and you can switch back to the original anytime via the View original file button in the header.
• If an editor-friendly copy already exists in the workspace, the notice automatically detects it and provides a one-click Switch to Editor View button.
• The copy no longer has those shapes grouped, and it drops the older fallback drawing some Word versions store beside them. It looks the same in Word, but if you want the original structure, keep working in the original.
• A group Cosmo cannot convert faithfully (for example one that is scaled) is left as it was, and the notice says how many.
• Colours that rely on partial transparency can look slightly stronger in the editor than in Word.

Other things the editor does not display are listed the same way — rotated text boxes, a text box inside another text box, a page background, and EMF/WMF images (shown as placeholders). To check how such a page looks, download the file and open it in Word.

Limits

Documents up to 40 MB can be uploaded. Password-protected files, files containing macros and damaged files are refused with a message saying why; the assistant can only change a .docx, not the older .doc format.

Privacy

The editor runs on your computer: the document is opened and edited locally, and nothing is sent to an editing service. The assistant only sees the document's text when you ask it to work on it, in the same way as any other file you share with the chat.