Open Source AI Dev is Going After Microsoft Office, Too

Yesterday, I wrote about Artcraft using AI to recreate the seven top Adobe Creative Cloud apps as free, open source, clean-room alternatives written with Rust using Anthropic Claude. But it’s not starting there. The startup also has similar projects underway to replace Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

These apps–called WordCraft, GridCraft, and DeckCraft, respectively, aren’t as far along as the Adobe-inspired apps. And it looks like ArtCraft and what might be its only employee, Brandon Thomas, have removed the download links from its website. But you can find out more about each–and build the apps for Windows, Mac, or Linux if you’re technical enough and so inclined–from the company’s GitHub repositories. (There are also download links there, noted below.)

WordCraft is “an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Microsoft Word, rebuilt in pure Rust.” It reads and writes DOCX, provides the interfaces you know and deal with–“the ribbon, styles, tables, track changes, references, and mail merge”–and looks and works like the real thing. ArtCraft claims that the current version of this app is 87 percent complete for ribbon-based commands and about 62 percent overall when it comes to “real feature parity.” You can download WordCraft here.

GridCraft is “an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Microsoft Excel, rebuilt in pure Rust.” This one is pre-alpha but “moving fast,” ArtCraft says, noting that the app covers 89 percent of Excel’s ribbon-based commands and about 93 percent of its worksheet functions. You can download GridCraft here.

DeckCraft is, you guessed it, “an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Microsoft PowerPoint, rebuilt in pure Rust.” It’s in early development and the current version of the app covers about 79 percent of PowerPoint’s features and is 80 percent of the way to the first alpha. You can download DeckCraft here.

We live in an age of wonder.