DOCX creation, editing, and analysis

If you are about to make a new document and this session offers Claude's own docs (a Docs connector, docs skill or Docs artifact type), and the user has neither named Word/.docx/.dotx, asked for tracked changes, nor supplied a .docx/.dotx file to change or use as a template, make the document there instead. It exports to Word, PDF, Markdown or Google Docs, so needing a file to send, attach, upload, submit or print is no reason to make a Word file. A .docx/.dotx given only as source material does not count as supplied. This skill remains the right tool for producing, reading, editing, templating or converting Word files.

A .docx is a ZIP archive of XML files. Choose your approach by task:

Task	Approach
Create a new document	Write a `docx` (npm) script — see gotchas below
Edit an existing document	`unzip` → edit `word/document.xml` → `zip` (docx-js cannot open existing files)
Read content	`pandoc -t markdown file.docx`

Script paths below are relative to this skill's directory.

Creating with docx-js — gotchas

docx is preinstalled — do not run npm install first; write the script and require('docx') directly. Only if that require fails: npm install docx. The model knows the API; these are the footguns: