🚰 KitchenSink4Word

Everything and the kitchen sink for Microsoft Word. The most complete Word (.docx) MCP server available — 119 tools, corruption-proof by construction, stress-tested against real dissertation manuscripts.

The origin story: an AI agent once needed fifteen minutes to edit twenty table cells in a Word document, because no existing Word MCP could delete a table column, bulk-edit cells, manage footnotes, AND insert a TOC. So instead of installing three mediocre servers, this one got built in a day — and now your agents won't have that problem.

Why this one (the honest comparison)

Every public Word MCP server was surveyed before building this (August 2026):

119 tools across: text and formatting, tables (including merge-aware column insert/delete and one-call bulk cell edits), footnotes/endnotes (full CRUD + footnote↔endnote conversion), TOC and caption lists, headers/footers/sections, images, bulleted/numbered lists, threaded comments, tracked changes (read, accept/reject by author, AND write edits as tracked changes), plus Word-COM-backed document compare, field refresh, PDF export, and open-clean validation on Windows.

What's new in v1.2 (2026-08-28)

• Word-native citations & bibliography: structured source store, CITATION fields with page/suppress switches, BIBLIOGRAPHY field, 12 selectable styles (APA, Chicago, MLA, IEEE, ...) — verified end-to-end: Word renders the fields in the selected style.
• Index (XE entries with nesting and see-references + INDEX field) and caption lists (List of Tables/Figures).
• Dissertation layout kit: roman-numeral page formats, line numbering, watermarks (compatible with Word's Remove Watermark), multi-column sections, Page X of Y.
• Document protection with Word-compatible SHA-512 password hashing (verified byte-for-byte against Word's own output); the trackedChanges mode forces recipients' edits to be tracked.
• Structure ops: move_section (a heading plus its entire section, tables included), template transfer (restyle to match a reference document with name-based style remapping), custom styles, character styles, document properties, image alt text.
• Table completions: gridBefore/gridAfter rows, named table styles, sort, split, header-row repeat, nested-table read/write, cell text direction.
• Formatting long-tail: small caps, hidden text, character spacing, kerning, CJK language tagging, tab stops with leaders, paragraph borders/shading, widow control, change-case.
• Analysis: per-section word counts, APA citation-parity checking, Word's proofing errors and readability statistics, chapter merge, reviewer combine, password-encrypted saving.

What makes it different

• Merge-aware table column operations. delete_columns / insert_columns work correctly through horizontally and vertically merged cells (gridSpan shrinks, vMerge chains re-root). At the time of writing, no other public Word MCP has this.
• Bulk-first API. Editing 20 cells is ONE set_cells call with a payload, not 20 round-trips.
• Tracked-change writing. track=True, author="Jane" on replace/insert/ delete/cell tools produces real Word revisions the recipient can accept/reject — proven round-trip against the server's own revision engine.
• Document compare. com_compare_documents produces a Word-native redline between two versions of a document.
• Never corrupts. Atomic saves (temp file → structural validation → replace), automatic timestamped backups before every mutation, byte-identical passthrough of anything not being edited (equations, textboxes, content controls survive untouched), and clean typed errors — a file open in Word is refused with a message, not a hang.
• Fragmented-run safe. Find/replace works across Word's arbitrarily split runs while preserving per-character formatting, with a ReDoS timeout guard on user regex and an optional max_replacements blast-radius limit.

Requirements

• Windows (COM tools require Microsoft Word installed; all other tools are pure file manipulation and work without Word)
• Python 3.12+ (developed on 3.14)

Install

git clone https://github.com/nometalalchemist/KitchenSink4Word
cd KitchenSink4Word
python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\pip install -e .

Register with Claude Code:

claude mcp add word -s user -- <absolute-path-to>\word-mcp\.venv\Scripts\word-mcp.exe

Safety model

• Every mutating tool takes file_path and writes a <name>.bak-<timestamp>.docx beside it before the first change (backup=False to skip).
• Saves are atomic and validated; a failed operation leaves the original byte-identical.
• Deleting content that carries footnote references automatically removes the now-orphaned definitions; validate_document / validate_notes report integrity in both directions.
• Paragraph deletion refuses ranges that would cut a field (TOC, PAGEREF) in half or silently swallow a section break.

Testing

335 tests. The full suite runs against a corpus of real-world documents (dissertation chapters, a thesis with 171 footnotes, a manuscript with 126 tracked changes and reviewer comments) that is private and not shipped — corpus-dependent tests skip cleanly with an explanation. See tests/conftest.py for how to supply your own corpus. tests/word_validator.py opens outputs in invisible Word and fails on any repair prompt — the definitive corruption check.

Development history: built with Claude Code in a single day (2026-08-27), tested through three rounds — unit gates per phase, an edge-case session (89 calls), and two "insane mode" rounds through the raw MCP stdio transport (scale torture, pathological merge topologies, Unicode/schema fuzzing, ReDoS, Word-lock lifecycle, COM leak checks), and a dedicated cross-feature interaction bug-hunt. All findings fixed with regression tests. research/ documents the OOXML algorithms and pitfalls the implementation is built on, with attribution to the MIT-licensed reference implementations studied.

Known limits

• No live editing of documents open in Word (clean refusal; COM tools work on saved files).
• TOC/caption-list page numbers require a field update: automatic on next Word open (update_on_open), or immediate via com_refresh_fields.

License

PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 — free for personal, academic, research, and any other noncommercial use. Using it to make money? That's fine too — just ask first: open an issue to arrange a commercial license.