Edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with Claude on your Mac
Ask a chatbot to "clean up this spreadsheet" and the usual answer is: upload the file, wait, download whatever comes back, hope the formulas survived the round trip. For a budget you'd rather not send to someone else's server, that's a lot of trust for a small favour.
There's a quieter way. TruePath Office ships an open-source MCP server, so Claude, Cursor, or Codex can open your .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx files directly on your Mac — read them, change them, save them — without any of it going near a network.
What MCP is, in one paragraph
The Model Context Protocol is a standard way for an AI host to call outside tools mid-conversation. An MCP "server" hands the host a small set of actions it can use. Here, the server is a local binary that knows how to parse and write Office formats, so the tool your agent reaches for is a document engine running on your own machine.
What the agent can actually do
Fourteen tools, grouped by the thing you're working on:
- Spreadsheets — load and save workbooks, query a cell range, and evaluate a formula outright. That last one is handy on its own: you can hand it a formula and a grid of numbers and get the result without opening Excel.
- Slides — load and save PPTX decks.
- Word — read the body text, load the metadata, or pull the whole document into structured JSON (paragraphs, runs, formatting, tables, sections, headers, footers, even footnotes) when the agent needs to reason about shape, not just words.
- PDF — get page and text info, merge, split at a page, or add password protection.
The pattern that makes this useful: the agent reads structure, decides, and writes the result back to a file — all in the same conversation, all on disk, none of it uploaded.
Setting it up
The server is standalone — it doesn't need the app installed. You build it from source and point your agent at the binary. You'll need macOS 14 or newer and a Swift 6 toolchain.
git clone https://github.com/JoyTruepath/truepath-office-mcp.git
cd truepath-office-mcp
swift build -c releaseThat produces the server at .build/release/truepath-office-mcp. For Claude Code, wiring it up is one line (use your own absolute path):
claude mcp add truepath-office -- "/path/to/truepath-office-mcp/.build/release/truepath-office-mcp"The README has the same snippet for Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor, and Windsurf. Restart the host, then ask in plain language:
Use truepath-office to read the body text of ~/Documents/report.docx.The privacy part, because it's the whole point
The reason to run a document engine locally instead of uploading to a service is simple: your documents are often the sensitive part. So the server makes no network calls at all — no telemetry, no analytics, no account, and it works offline forever. It reads and writes the files you name, and that's the extent of its reach.
The engine here, TruePathCore, is the same one that ships inside the TruePath Office app — Foundation-only, with zero third-party dependencies. It's open-sourced under MIT on GitHub, partly so the "nothing leaves your Mac" claim is something you can read rather than take on faith.
Why open-source the engine at all
Because the app's pitch is that your files stay on your machine, and that's a claim you should be able to check. The paid Mac app is what funds the work — one purchase, no subscription — but the core that does the parsing is out in the open. If you live in an agent already, that means you can give it real document skills without adding a cloud dependency you'll have to explain later.
A few things people ask
Does anything get uploaded?
No. The server runs locally and makes no network calls — offline, no account, no telemetry.
Do I need the app?
No. The server is standalone and builds from source. The app is the paid product; the engine is open source.
Which agents work with it?
Any MCP client — there are ready-made snippets for Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and Windsurf.