Docx

Overview

This skill enables comprehensive Word document operations through multiple specialized workflows for reading, creating, and editing documents.

Quick Start

from docx import Document

# Read existing document
doc = Document("document.docx")
for para in doc.paragraphs:
    print(para.text)

# Create new document
doc = Document()
doc.add_heading("My Title", level=0)
doc.add_paragraph("Hello, World!")
doc.save("output.docx")

Fallback: inspect .docx without python-docx

If python-docx is unavailable but the task is read-only inspection, treat .docx as a ZIP archive and extract Word XML text directly instead of stopping:

from pathlib import Path
from zipfile import ZipFile
import re
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

path = Path("document.docx")
with ZipFile(path) as zf:
    xml = zf.read("word/document.xml")
root = ET.fromstring(xml)
ns = {"w": "http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main"}
texts = [node.text or "" for node in root.findall(".//w:t", ns)]
print(re.sub(r"\n{3,}", "\n\n", "\n".join(texts)))

Use this for content discovery and comparison only; use a real DOCX library or office converter for preserving layout, images, tables, comments, tracked changes, and styles.

When to Use

• Extracting text and tables from Word documents
• Creating professional documents programmatically
• Generating reports from templates
• Bulk document processing and modification
• Legal document redlining with tracked changes
• Converting Word documents to other formats
• Adding headers, footers, and page numbers
• Inserting images and tables into documents

Version History

• 1.1.0 (2026-01-02): Added Quick Start, When to Use, Execution Checklist, Error Handling, Metrics sections; updated frontmatter with version, category, related_skills
• 1.0.0 (2024-10-15): Initial release with python-docx, pandoc integration, redlining workflow

Sub-Skills

• Execution Checklist
• Error Handling
• Metrics
• Dependencies

Sub-Skills

• Core Capabilities
• Extract Text with Pandoc (+2)
• Basic Document Creation (+3)
• Modify Existing Document (+1)
• Step 1: Convert to Markdown (+4)
• Extract Metadata
• Working with Headers/Footers