Office Transform

Turn a structural selection of an Office/PDF document into a new derived file.

Two invariants hold for every operation:

1. The source file is read-only. Every result is a new file; both scripts refuse to write to the source path or overwrite an existing file. Never work around this with ad-hoc shell edits to the original.
2. Anchors are structural. Selections address the document's own coordinates, worksheet + A1 range, body-level paragraph ordinal, one-based page number, never screen or DOM positions.

When to use which tool

• Only need to read a document to summarize or answer questions → use mcp__cherry-tools__to_markdown instead (see the cherry-tool-guide skill); it is lossy but built for reading.
• The user wants a file out, an extracted range, a converted fragment, an edited copy → this skill.

Input: selection references

Chat surfaces may hand you a fenced selection-ref block:

{"path": "/abs/report.xlsx", "anchor": {"format": "xlsx", "sheet": "Sheet1", "range": "A1:C10"}, "excerpt": "…", "fileStamp": {"size": 1024, "mtimeMs": 1700000000000}}

The anchor object is exactly what the scripts take via --anchor.

A block may also carry comment: what the user wants done at that location, in their own words. Treat it as the user's instruction for that anchor. It is not part of the anchor, so never pass it to a script.

Freshness check. fileStamp.mtimeMs is milliseconds since the Unix epoch, floored to whole milliseconds. Do not compare it to stat's default output: stat -f %m (macOS) and stat -c %Y (GNU) give whole seconds, so multiplying by 1000 loses the sub-second part and never matches. Read whole milliseconds the way the app wrote them:

uv run python -c "import os,sys;st=os.stat(sys.argv[1]);print(st.st_size, st.st_mtime_ns//1_000_000)" '/abs/report.xlsx'