Edit an attached Word or Excel file
Attach a Word document or an Excel workbook and ask for the change. Dropstone edits the file you attached, so its formatting, styles, charts, and images survive, and you get a new file back. The original is left untouched.
Attach the file, then say what you want changed. Dropstone edits the file you attached rather than rebuilding its text, so the change inherits the styling of what it replaced and the rest of the document is left exactly as it was.
This works for Word documents (.docx) and Excel workbooks (.xlsx). Everything else you can attach, PDFs included, is read-only.
What you can change
In a Word document, words:
- Replace text, quoting it exactly: "replace Acme Ltd with Acme Limited".
- Every occurrence at once, or only the first one.
- Text in headers and footers, not only in the body.
In an Excel workbook, cells:
- Values, and formulas, which recalculate when the file is opened.
- One cell, or a whole range: a row, a column, or a block of them.
- How a cell looks: bold, italic, fill colour, text colour, number format.
- Find a cell by what is in it when you do not know where it is: "which row is EMEA on".
What it will not do
Dropstone changes what is inside the file, not the shape of it.
- Word: no structural changes. It cannot add or delete paragraphs, tables, or sections. If you need new sections written, ask for a new document, or change the words that are already there.
- Excel: no new rows or columns. It cannot insert or delete rows or columns, because the charts, merged cells, and formulas that depend on them would move. It says so rather than overwriting the cells beside them.
- PDFs and presentations are read-only, and so are the older formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt) and the OpenDocument ones.
How to ask
- Attach the Word or Excel file to your message.
- Ask for the change in plain language. For a Word document, quote the text exactly as it appears.
- Download the edited file from the card under the reply.
A Word edit works by finding the text you name and replacing it, so if the wording does not match, Dropstone tells you it did not find it rather than guessing. Read the document again and quote it exactly.
What you get back
- A new file, not a changed one. The file you attached is left as it was, so a wrong edit is recoverable and you can always go back to the original.
- The same name. Editing Q3.xlsx gives you a Q3.xlsx to download, not a copy under another name.
- A card under the reply with the download, and a preview you can open in place. The preview draws the data; charts, images, and conditional formatting stay in the file.
Limitations
- Temporary chats. In an incognito chat a spreadsheet cannot be edited, because a temporary chat does not keep the original it would edit. Files there are deleted within 24 hours, so download anything you want to keep.
Related articles
- Upload files and documentsAttach PDFs, Word documents, Excel workbooks, presentations, CSVs, Markdown, and images to a conversation. Scanned PDFs are read with OCR. Supported formats, limits, and how the content reaches Dropstone.
- Create a PDF, Word, Excel, or PowerPoint fileAsk for a report, a spreadsheet, or a deck and download it as a real file. PDF, Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx), CSV, PowerPoint (.pptx), PNG, or Markdown, one file or several, each with its own design.
- ArtifactsWhen you ask Dropstone for something you can see, a page, a chart, a document, a diagram, a small app, it builds an artifact beside the conversation that you can view, refine, and share.
- Incognito chatsAn incognito chat writes nothing to your memory: nothing you say or correct is kept, and no summary is made. What Dropstone already knows about you is still available to it, so the work gets the same assistant without leaving a trace.
- Projects and project filesA project groups conversations and files around one piece of work. Upload documents once and every conversation in the project has them. Here is how to create, organize, and use projects in Dropstone Chat.