Introducing Paper Office

paper-docxpaper-pptxpaper-xlsx Today, we release Paper Office, a suite of Python packages that allow agents to manipulate Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files with added safety, correctness and breadth, building on legacy open source packages: python-docx, python-pptx and OpenPyxl. Across five models and 61 tasks, Paper packages plus guidance passed 92.5% of trials, versus 80.7% for upstream packages without skills and 69.5% with Anthropic's comparable Office skills. Agents also wrote code to edit Office file internals directly in just 1.6% of Paper runs, compared with 78.7% without skills and 50.5% with Anthropic skills. We note that basic software, in addition to prompt, skills, and tools, remains an important lever for harness optimization. Brownfield Knowledge Work Agents still have low penetration in the daily work of consultants, lawyers, bankers, and operators. We believe the bottleneck to professional adoption is fidelity to real workflows. Agents dont manipulate existing documents with the same techniques that humans do, and the resulting decks, sheets, and documents sit in an uncanny valley that aren't fit for client consumption.

The standard Python Office libraries (python-docx, python-pptx, and openpyxl) are mature construction tools with years of accumulated edge cases, and most production agents often rely on these libraries for doc manipulation. However, they haven't seen updates in several years and, for many important workflows, lack feature breadth and correctness contracts. In some cases, models opt for other Javascript based packages or HTML-to-document processes to more easily represent and manipulate classic office documents, but these intermediate representations are lossy and often corrupt existing, brownfield work. We forked, patched, and reworked the APIs of the standard Python Office libraries to support a variety of agent-first use cases, improving correctness and expanding feature completeness.