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Developer releases free AI-built clones of Word, Excel and PowerPoint

Brandon Thomas has published open-source Office alternatives built with Anthropic's Claude, days after his free Adobe app clones drew attention.

Why it matters: A free, offline alternative that opens the same files undercuts Microsoft 365 subscriptions, while showing how quickly AI models can now produce working software.

InvestIn.News NewsDesk · 1 min read
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Picture from Decrypt for: Developer releases free AI-built clones of Word, Excel and PowerPoint
Image: Decrypt
Original reporting: Jose Antonio Lanz, Decrypt

Key points

  • The team rates WordCraft about 60% and GridCraft about 50% ready for real work; DeckCraft has not reached alpha.
  • Microsoft 365 Personal costs $99.99 a year, while the clones are free and run offline.

The developer behind free AI-built clones of Adobe's apps has released open-source clones of Microsoft Office.

GridCraft handles 513 of Excel's 523 worksheet functions and 89% of its ribbon commands.

The team still rates the apps well short of production use: about 60% for WordCraft and 50% for GridCraft, with WordCraft labelled alpha and DeckCraft yet to reach its first alpha. Thomas describes the work as a clean-room rebuild from public file-format specifications, the approach Compaq used to clone IBM's PC BIOS in the 1980s. The MIT and Apache 2.0 licences allow reuse, even commercially.

Every button doubles as a command an AI agent can trigger through MCP, the Model Context Protocol Anthropic created. WordCraft had more than 12,000 GitHub stars as of Wednesday.

Read the full story on Decrypt

Live updates on NewsFeeds:AIDesk editor: Keshav Aggarwal (accountable for this page; this summary was not edited by hand)

How this was produced: an AI model wrote this summary of Decrypt’s report, which we credit and link above. Read our Editorial and AI policy. Spotted a mistake? See Corrections.

Not investment advice. Read the risk disclaimer.

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