Developer Builds Free Open-Source Clones of Word, Excel and PowerPoint

ArtCraft has released free, MIT-or-Apache-licensed rebuilds of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, alongside a separate AutoCAD-style CADCraft project.

On October 7, ArtCraft shipped three new open-source apps: WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft. They're clean-room reimplementations of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, written from scratch in Rust, and they read and write the real DOCX, XLSX and PPTX file formats Microsoft uses. No subscription, no license key, no Microsoft 365 account required.

The developer behind it is Brandon Thomas, who runs ArtCraft and says he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to help write the code. According to Thurrott's coverage of the launch, GridCraft already covers 89% of Excel's ribbon-based commands and about 93% of its worksheet functions, while GridCraft's own README now estimates it is about 50% ready for real work. WordCraft is further behind on real feature parity, sitting around 62% complete despite covering 87% of Word's ribbon commands. The easy UI surface came fast. The deep formatting logic is still catching up. By October 11, WordCraft had pulled in more than 5,100 GitHub stars, with GridCraft above 2,600 and DeckCraft around 1,800, according to the project's repositories under the storytold GitHub organization.

This isn't Thomas's first swing at an entrenched software category. Days earlier, he put out a seven-app clone of Adobe's Creative Cloud suite: PhotoCraft standing in for Photoshop, VectorCraft for Illustrator, FilmCraft for Premiere, LightCraft for Lightroom, EffectCraft for After Effects, DesignCraft for InDesign and PdfCraft for Acrobat Pro. By his own account, reported by TechSpot, the motivation was personal. Thomas says he got hit with Adobe's cancellation fee, the one subscribers run into when they try to drop a plan early, "one too many times," and decided to build his way out of it.

He's not shy about the scale of his ambition, either. Thomas describes himself as a 15-year software engineering veteran with roughly a decade of Rust experience, and on launch he claimed the Adobe suite would hit "100% parity within a month." He's since walked that back. In comments on Hacker News, he said reaching 99% parity would more realistically take months, not years - a more sober number than his original pitch, but still an aggressive one for seven full applications built largely by AI-assisted coding.

The Office clones weren't a standalone side project. ArtCraft has also published CADCraft, a clean-room rebuild of AutoCAD covering the command line, object snaps, layers, dimensions, hatches, blocks and DXF file support. It runs natively on Windows, macOS, Linux and FreeBSD, and compiles to WebAssembly for the browser, the same architecture ArtCraft used for the Office and Adobe apps. Autodesk's subscription pricing for AutoCAD runs into the thousands of dollars a year for a single seat, which makes it a natural next target for the same playbook: reverse-engineer the file format, rebuild the interface from public specs and observed behavior, skip the proprietary code entirely.

The launch also drew quick attention from developers and AI-watchers. The reaction has not been simple hype. It's not that WordCraft is ready to replace Word in a law firm tomorrow. Commenters have already flagged basic functionality gaps in the Adobe clones, and GridCraft's own numbers show formatting-deep parity still lagging the surface-level UI. It's that a developer, leaning on an AI coding model, can now credibly attempt to clone three entrenched, decade-old enterprise suites in the space of a few weeks.

That's the part that should worry Microsoft and Autodesk more than the apps themselves. Office and AutoCAD's moats were never really about features nobody else could build. They were about the sheer cost and time of building a compatible alternative from scratch. Claude Opus 5.5 just made that cost a lot smaller for at least one person with the Rust skills to use it.

Thomas has written that the free apps will be funded by selling token-based access to ArtCraft's existing visual AI model and IDE, according to Ars Technica. Whether that model holds up long-term is an open question. What's not in question is that WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft exist, they're free, and they're already on GitHub for anyone to build.

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