Working day-to-day

What the assistant works on

Writespect gives the assistant a fixed set of tools that act only on the Word document you point it at. It can read that document’s paragraphs, styles, tracked changes, comments, tables, headers and footers, and it can edit them. That includes creating tables and inserting or deleting their rows and columns.

It cannot browse your files, your email, or the web through Writespect, and it does not touch your other open documents.

Say which document

If exactly one document is open, the assistant can work on it without being told. If several are open and you haven’t said which, Writespect refuses rather than guessing; an edit landing in the wrong file is expensive and might not be noticed for days.

The habit that avoids this entirely: name the document once at the start of a session, or ask the assistant to list the open documents and pick from that.

Open or closed?

Writespect can work on a document whether or not Word has it open, but the two paths differ in one important way:

  • Open in Word; full capability, including tracked changes and Word-native redlines. Edits appear live as you watch.
  • Not open; Writespect reads and edits the saved .docx directly. Faster for bulk work, but tracked changes are not available: Word itself is what records revisions. Asking for a tracked edit on a closed file is refused rather than quietly made untracked.

If Word has the document open in a window Writespect can’t reach; Protected View, or a Word running as administrator; it refuses the edit rather than writing to the file underneath Word. You’ll be asked to bring the document forward or close it.

Co-editing: take turns

You and the assistant can work the same document. Writespect re-reads the current state before every change, and an assistant that has pinned what it read will fail rather than apply an edit to a document that has moved underneath it.

The one rule: take turns. Don’t type in a paragraph while the assistant is working on it. Let one side finish, then the other.

Undo

Most edits land as a single entry on Word’s undo stack, so one Ctrl+Z reverses one instruction. Header and footer edits are the exception and may require several Ctrl+Z presses.

Writespect also takes its own snapshot before every change, so you can ask the assistant to undo an edit, or restore the document to how it was before. See Tracked changes & review.

Saving

Writespect saves the document as part of making an edit, so what’s on disk matches what you see. It does not file, send, upload, or share anything; there’s nowhere for it to send it to.

For a PDF, ask: the assistant can export one, and will put it where you say.