WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft: ArtCraft's Free Microsoft Office Alternative in Rust
ArtCraft's office trio rebuilds Word, Excel and PowerPoint in pure Rust, with .docx, .xlsx and .pptx support. What works, what's missing, and how they compare to LibreOffice.
Published October 13, 2026 · Unofficial community guide
After the Adobe-style apps, the ArtCraft team turned to Microsoft Office. WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft are clean-room reimplementations of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, written in pure Rust, free, and able to open and save Office files. Here’s what they can do.
WordCraft: a free Microsoft Word alternative
WordCraft gives you Word’s ribbon, the live Styles gallery and Word’s keyboard behavior: Enter continues a list, Tab demotes it, Ctrl/⌘+B bolds the word under the caret.
- Files: reads and writes .docx (files open in Word), imports legacy .doc, exports PDF, and handles .odt, .rtf, .html, Markdown, LaTeX and plain text.
- Review: track changes, comment balloons in the margin, accept/reject, and spelling and grammar as you type, all offline.
- References: tables of contents, footnotes, citations in APA, MLA, Chicago or IEEE, an index and captions.
- Layout: themes, style sets, drop caps, text wrapping, hyphenation, line numbers, watermarks, page borders and mail merge.
- Status: alpha. Upstream says it covers 88% of Word’s ribbon features with commands.
“WordCraft AI” and other WordCrafts
If you searched “wordcraft ai”, you may be thinking of Google’s Wordcraft, a research project from Google’s PAIR team (published in 2022) that explored AI-assisted story writing. It’s unrelated. ArtCraft’s WordCraft is a traditional word processor, though, like all the Crafting Apps, it can be driven by AI agents: its 422 commands are available through a CLI and an MCP server.
GridCraft: a free Excel alternative
GridCraft treats XLSX as its native format, so styles, themes, formulas, tables, conditional formats, validation, comments, charts, sparklines and PivotTables survive a round-trip.
- Formulas: 500+ functions, dynamic arrays with spilling,
LETandLAMBDA, structured table references, and an incremental dependency-graph engine. - PivotTables: field list, filters, layouts, date grouping and show-values-as.
- Charts: seventeen chart types with a Chart Design tab and Format pane.
- Legacy files:
.xlsopens with values, formulas and number formats; XLSB and ODS data can be imported. - Localization: Spanish formula names and decimal commas are available.
- Status: alpha. The core workflow works end to end.
DeckCraft: a free PowerPoint alternative
DeckCraft builds decks with slide masters and eleven layouts, 150+ preset shapes, glued connectors, tables, charts and SmartArt basics. When you present, you get transitions including Morph, plus entrance, emphasis, exit and motion-path animations.
- Files: opens and saves .pptx; exports PDF slides, notes pages and handouts.
- Automation: 200+ commands with undo, scriptable from the CLI, a JSON control channel and MCP.
- Status: alpha, covering about 79% of PowerPoint’s features by breadth and 92% of the core.
How do they compare to LibreOffice?
| ArtCraft trio | LibreOffice | |
|---|---|---|
| Interface | Microsoft-style ribbon | Classic menus or optional “tabbed” UI |
| Native format | .docx / .xlsx / .pptx | ODF (.odt, .ods, .odp) |
| Maturity | Alpha (weeks old) | Mature (decades) |
| Runs in the browser | Yes, WebAssembly | Not officially |
| AI agent control | Built-in CLI + MCP | Via UNO/macros |
| Language | Rust | C++ / Java |
LibreOffice is far more mature. The ArtCraft apps’ appeal is the familiar Microsoft-style UI, OOXML as the native format, a browser build and first-class automation.
Try them now
Or download them from the official releases: WordCraft · GridCraft · DeckCraft.