🚰 KitchenSink4Word

Everything plus the kitchen sink for Microsoft Word. The most complete Word (.docx) MCP server available — 170 tools, engineered not to corrupt, stress-tested against long, heavily formatted real-world documents. Now with live editing: documents open in Word are edited in place, visibly, with each tool call landing as a single Ctrl+Z step.

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):

170 tools across: equations (LaTeX → Word math), Zotero library citations, publication style conversion (8 styles, beta), review-cycle analytics, workflow suites (mail merge, batch operations, redaction, compliance/accessibility audits, submission prep, front matter, diagnostics), 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 v1.4 (2026-08-28)

The workflow tier — 24 new tools that turn document primitives into complete jobs:

• Document production: mail_merge (template + CSV/JSON → one document per row, atomic collision refusal), fill_template ({{placeholders}} and MERGEFIELDs, safe across fragmented runs), batch_apply (the same edits across dozens of files, all-or-nothing per file), form-field tooling (legacy form fields AND content controls: list, fill, validate completeness).
• Pre-flight checks: check_template_compliance (validate margins, fonts, spacing, heading structure, page-numbering and required sections against a ruleset you write from any formatting guide), check_brand_compliance, audit_accessibility (heading hierarchy, alt text, table headers, contrast, link text), check_image_resolution (effective DPI vs a print threshold), validate_cross_references (broken REF/PAGEREF targets plus "see Figure 3" text references that match nothing), validate_captions, check_defined_terms (legal drafts: defined-but-unused, used-but-undefined, defined twice, used before defined).
• Finishing moves: prepare_for_submission (accept all revisions, strip comments and identifying metadata in one call — content untouched, idempotent), redact_text (TRUE removal from text, tables, headers, footnotes, comments, properties, hyperlinks, field codes and tracked deletions, with a verification re-scan and an explicit list of what was NOT examined), assemble_front_matter (title page through TOC with roman/arabic numbering switch in one call), setup_chapter_headers (chapter-title headers via STYLEREF), diagnose_document (13 structural health checks that never crash on a broken file), com_import_pdf (PDF → editable .docx via Word's own converter), reference-manager field inventory + integrity checking (Zotero, EndNote, Mendeley).

What's new in v1.3 (2026-08-28)

Live editing. A document open in Word no longer has to be closed first — the high-value tools route to a live COM layer automatically when the file is locked (or explicitly with live="force"; live="off" restores the old refusal):

• Edits appear in the Word window immediately; nothing touches the disk until the USER saves (or an explicit save tool is called). Unsaved work is never auto-saved or auto-closed.
• One tool call = one Ctrl+Z step. Every mutating call is wrapped in a custom undo record, so a bulk replace of 40 matches reverts with a single undo.
• The cursor is sacred. All addressing is Range-based; the user's selection, scroll position, and view are never touched. (One deliberate exception: live_scroll_to brings a location into view on request — without selecting it.)
• Routed tools: search_and_replace, insert_paragraphs, delete_paragraphs, set_cells, format_text, get_text, find_text, get_outline, get_document_info. Live-only tools: live_insert_at_cursor, live_scroll_to, live_set_track_changes, word_live_repair (recovery if a crashed client left Word in a bad state).
• Honest state reporting on every live result: document dirty, AutoSave state, read-only, enforced tracking under protection, and per-item skip counts when matches sit inside field results (Word regenerates those, so editing them is refused rather than faked).
• Protection-restricted documents get typed refusals up front; documents in Protected View are named as such.
• Reference-manager field codes (Zotero and friends) survive live and file-based edits around them — verified by dedicated tests.

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).
• Long-document 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

Two minutes, start to editing:

pip install kitchensink4word
claude mcp add word -s user -- kitchensink4word

For Claude Desktop / Cursor / any MCP client, point the server command at the installed kitchensink4word (or word-mcp) executable:

{"mcpServers": {"word": {"command": "kitchensink4word"}}}

From source instead:

git clone https://github.com/nometalalchemist/KitchenSink4Word
cd KitchenSink4Word
python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\pip install -e .
claude mcp add word -s user -- <absolute-path>\.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

344 tests, running everywhere: the suite was developed against a private corpus of real-world documents (book-length chapters, a document with 171 footnotes, a manuscript with 126 tracked changes and reviewer comments), and CI auto-generates structurally equivalent synthetic stand-ins (tests/make_corpus.py) so the full suite runs on any machine — including yours and every pull request. Local real documents, when present, take precedence. 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.

Maturity — what the version number does and does not claim

This project moves fast and is honest about what backs it. What the test record covers: every release passes the full suite (626 tests) plus dedicated adversarial rounds through the raw MCP transport (~2,500 calls to date), against a corpus of long, heavily formatted real-world documents — with zero corruption across all of it. What it does not yet cover: other machines, Word builds older than current Microsoft 365, non-English Word installs (some tools reference styles by localized display name), RTL scripts, and the diversity of documents only real users bring. The safety net while the tool earns that mileage is structural: automatic timestamped backups before every mutation and atomic validated saves, so a bad outcome is a restore, not a loss. If something misbehaves on your documents, an issue with the symptom (never the document itself, unless it contains nothing private) is the most valuable thing you can send.

Beta-labeled tools — heuristic by nature; review their flagged-items list rather than trusting silently: convert_citation_style, anonymize_for_review, check_defined_terms, and the text-reference scan inside validate_cross_references. Each returns an explicit list of what it could not confidently handle.

Known limits

• Live regex replacements skip matches positioned after complex fields in a story (COM character offsets drift there); the skip count is reported and a literal find still works. Live set_cells refuses vertically merged tables (the file-based tool is merge-aware — close the doc for those).
• Live tracked-change attribution is best-effort: Word signed into an Office account attributes revisions to that account; results report the effective author honestly.
• 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. Commercial use requires a separate license before use — open an issue to arrange one.