Free Rust Versions of Word, Excel and AutoCAD Open Your Files

WordCraft, GridCraft, DeckCraft and CADCraft are free rebuilds of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and AutoCAD that open and save the real file formats, and an AI agent can drive them by command. The WordCraft team rates its own app about 60% ready for real work.
software-engineering
artificial-intelligence
Author

Kabui, Charles

Published

2026-10-24

Keywords

docx-compatibility, open-source-word-processor, rust-desktop-apps, agent-drivable-apps, microsoft-office-alternative

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WordCraft is a free word processor for Windows, macOS, Linux and the browser that opens and saves the .docx files Word produces. It comes from the team behind VectorCraft, a free rebuild of Illustrator, is written from scratch in Rust, a programming language built for speed, using published file formats, and shipped installers in October. Office Watch tried the Windows builds on its own Microsoft 365 documents and reported that, apart from some spreadsheet functions, every .docx, .xlsx and .pptx file it opened edited without trouble.

The same team’s other apps cover the other formats. GridCraft reads and writes .xlsx with pivot tables, seventeen chart types and more than 500 worksheet functions, DeckCraft handles .pptx, and CADCraft reads and writes AutoCAD’s DXF drawing files and opens its DWG files. None of them needs an account or a subscription. Every button is also a command with an id, so an AI agent can fill a template one command at a time, then read the document back as JSON, a structured text format, to check its own work instead of taking screenshots.

WordCraft’s roadmap wires a command to 493 of the 508 menu and toolbar buttons (97%), and still rates the app about 60% ready for real work. Getting to beta is estimated at 150 to 230 hours of work by an AI coding agent, Claude Opus 5.5. Of 120 issues filed by people outside the project, none came from someone who had replaced Word.

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Citation

BibTeX citation:
@misc{kabui2026,
  author = {{Kabui, Charles}},
  title = {Free {Rust} {Versions} of {Word,} {Excel} and {AutoCAD}
    {Open} {Your} {Files}},
  date = {2026-10-24},
  url = {https://toknow.ai/posts/wordcraft-gridcraft-deckcraft-cadcraft-rust-office/},
  langid = {en-GB}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Kabui, Charles. 2026. “Free Rust Versions of Word, Excel and AutoCAD Open Your Files.” https://toknow.ai/posts/wordcraft-gridcraft-deckcraft-cadcraft-rust-office/.