A Developer Used Claude to Build Free Open-Source Clones of Word, Excel and PowerPoint

First Adobe, now Microsoft

Atlanta engineer Brandon Thomas has done it again. Days after releasing free open-source stand-ins for seven Adobe applications, his ArtCraft project has posted clones of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint to GitHub, per Tom's Hardware.

The new apps are WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft. All three are clean-room rebuilds written in Rust, built with help from Anthropic's Claude, and released free under MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses.

They read and write the real Microsoft file formats, DOCX, XLSX and PPTX, and run on macOS, Windows and Linux. WordCraft can also run in a browser.

How complete are they?

By ArtCraft's own numbers, WordCraft covers about 87 percent of Word's ribbon commands and roughly 62 percent of full feature parity. It handles mail merge, track changes, tables and PDF export.

GridCraft, the Excel stand-in, claims about 93 percent of Excel's worksheet functions. DeckCraft covers roughly 79 percent of the PowerPoint feature set and is closing in on a first alpha.

The developer community noticed fast. WordCraft passed 5,100 GitHub stars within days, with GridCraft above 2,600 and DeckCraft around 1,800.

Why he built them

Thomas has said the project started with frustration over subscription software, in particular Adobe's cancellation fees, which he says hit him once too many times. The Adobe clones came first, in early alpha, and the Office set followed within the week.

Nothing here is close to enterprise-ready, and Thomas has been open about that. The deep formatting logic still lags the familiar interface. But the speed of the builds is the story: one developer plus an AI model is now producing credible first drafts of software categories that took incumbents decades to build.

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Options market and stocks to watch

MSFT is the name in the blast radius. Microsoft 365 is a subscription fortress, and stories about AI compressing the cost of building software feed directly into the debate over how durable that moat is.

ADBE is the precedent. It already lived through the first round of ArtCraft clones, and its stock is the market's running gauge of how seriously investors take the AI-clone threat to creative software.

Neither stock is likely to move on GitHub stars alone. The signal to watch is options flow: any unusual put buying in MSFT or ADBE on AI-disruption headlines would show the story graduating from novelty to thesis. Track it on the Unusual Whales news feed.

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