What your assistant can do
Writespect gives your assistant a toolkit aimed at one thing; changing a long, careful document without breaking it. Here’s what’s in it. You never call these by name; you ask in plain language and the assistant picks.
Reading
- The text, with paragraph boundaries, headings, lists, and visible numbering.
- The structure; headings and the document outline.
- Tracked changes already in the document, with who made them.
- Comments, including threaded replies.
- Tables, headers and footers, footnotes, and the styles in use.
- What you have selected, so “tighten this paragraph” works.
Reading is how good edits start. Asking for a report before a change is often the fastest route to the right change.
Editing text
- Replace, insert and delete; from a whole paragraph down to a precise span mid-sentence.
- Find and replace across the document, with a count first if you want to see the damage before committing.
- Surgical edits. Changing three words changes three words: the rest of the paragraph, including its formatting, is left alone. That matters under tracked changes, where a whole-paragraph rewrite would show as deleting and retyping the paragraph rather than as the small change it really was.
Tracked changes and review
- Make edits as Word revisions you accept or reject one by one.
- List the revisions in a document, with author and type.
- Accept or reject them.
- Word-native redlines: compare two versions and get Word’s own compare output; a real redline document you can send to a colleague, a client, or a reviewer, produced by Word’s compare engine rather than an imitation of it.
Comments
Read a comment thread, add a comment, reply in an existing thread, resolve one, or delete one. “Leave a note where you’re unsure rather than guessing” is a useful instruction to give.
Beyond the body text
The parts of a document that usually mean leaving the keyboard:
- Footnotes; read them with their anchors, insert new ones.
- Tables; create them with initial content and a Word table style, read their contents, edit individual cells, and insert or delete rows and columns.
- Headers and footers; read and edit them. Editing footer text preserves a live page-number field; replacing the whole footer would flatten it, so ask for the change you actually want.
- Styles; list them, apply one, copy paragraph formatting from one paragraph to another.
- PDF export.
Creating and restructuring tables
Ask for a new table at a named location in the document. You can specify the number of rows and columns, provide the initial cell contents, and name a Word table style such as Table Grid when you want visible borders.
For an existing table, Writespect can insert or delete whole rows and columns as well as change the contents of individual cells. If Track Changes is on, Word keeps a deleted row visible until that revision is accepted. Deleting the last remaining row or column removes the table.
Safety machinery
Working quietly underneath:
- A snapshot before every change, and the ability to restore.
- Grouped undo for most edits; header and footer changes may require several Ctrl+Z presses.
- A refusal to guess which document you meant when several are open.
- A refusal to edit on disk when Word may have the file open somewhere Writespect can’t see.
What it deliberately doesn’t do
- It doesn’t file, send, upload or share anything.
- It doesn’t browse your files, email or the web.
- It doesn’t touch documents you didn’t point it at.
- It doesn’t make tracked changes on a closed file; Word records revisions, so the document has to be open for that.