Troubleshooting

Start here: Check connection. Right-click the tray icon → Check connection…. The status window shows, in plain language, whether Writespect is running, whether Word is running, and which assistants are connected. Most problems are visible there in a few seconds.

My assistant doesn’t have any Word tools

In order of likelihood:

  1. The assistant wasn’t restarted after Writespect registered itself. Most read their configuration only at startup. Restart it.
  2. Writespect isn’t running. Look for the tray icon; a grey icon means stopped. Start it from the menu.
  3. The assistant was installed after Writespect. Right-click the tray icon → Connect and pick it.
  4. The assistant cannot reach a local server. Writespect requires a client that can connect to a local MCP server on the same Windows machine. See Connecting your AI assistant.

“Several documents are open; which one?”

Writespect refuses to guess when more than one document is open. Name the document, or ask the assistant to list the open documents and pick from that.

This is deliberate: guessing means edits landing in the wrong file.

“Word may have this document open somewhere I can’t reach”

Writespect thinks Word might be holding the file in a window it cannot see; usually Protected View (the yellow “Enable Editing” bar on a file from email or the internet), or a Word running as administrator when Writespect isn’t.

Fix: bring the document to the front in Word and click Enable Editing, or close it. Then retry.

It refuses rather than writing to the file on disk, because Word would overwrite that on its next save.

“Tracked changes need the document open”

Writespect can edit a saved .docx that isn’t open, but Word is what records revisions. Open the document in Word and ask again; or, if you genuinely don’t need the change tracked, say so explicitly.

The assistant edited the wrong paragraph

Almost always an ambiguous instruction. The usual cause is asking for a passage by position, or using a phrase that appears in several places. See Prompting for quality.

To recover: Ctrl+Z, or ask the assistant to undo. If the change was accepted and saved, ask it to restore the snapshot from before the edit.

Then re-ask, naming the heading or section and quoting a few words of the text.

An edit failed saying the document had changed

The assistant read the document, you edited it by hand, and then the assistant tried to apply a change based on what it read earlier. Rather than land the edit in the wrong place, it failed.

Ask again; it re-reads first. And take turns; don’t type in a paragraph while the assistant is working on it.

Word is slow or unresponsive during edits

Word does one thing at a time. A long instruction touching many paragraphs will occupy it briefly. If Word is showing a dialog, such as a save prompt or font warning, it will not respond until you dismiss it. Check for a hidden dialog box.

A registration keeps disappearing

Some assistants rewrite their configuration when they update and drop entries they didn’t add. Writespect re-registers at launch. If it keeps happening, check that Reconnecting clients is enabled in Preferences.

Getting help

Right-click the tray icon → Open logs folder. The log records which tool ran, the outcome, and the duration, not your document text. Review the log before sending it if file names or paths are sensitive, then attach it to your message to support.