Sort your documents into three buckets
Most organisations discover that 80% of their files are exchange documents, and that is exactly the part WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft handle.
- Exchange documents — written by you, read by others, or vice versa. These need format fidelity above all.
- Working documents — tracked changes, comments, review cycles. These need the revision workflow to survive.
- Living documents — linked data, pivot models, macros, templates that other files depend on. These are the hard ones.
· 5 steps
Write a round-trip test you can actually run
Take one document of each type and run it: open in the Craft app, edit, save, open in Office, diff visually and functionally.
- Word: styles and TOC, section breaks, headers per section, tracked changes and comment resolution.
- Excel: formulas across sheets, named ranges, conditional formatting, charts, pivot summaries, data validation.
- PowerPoint: master/layout inheritance, animation timing, embedded video, speaker notes.
Audit automation honestly
VBA and Office Scripts have no runtime in the Craft apps. Search your workbook and template library for macro-enabled files and decide for each one: rewrite as an external script, keep on Excel, or retire. Do this before anyone asks why the month-end report stopped producing itself.
Decide where collaboration lives
The Craft suite is file-based. Review cycles therefore run through whatever you already control — a shared drive, Nextcloud, Syncthing, a git repository for text — rather than through a vendor tenant. That is a privacy and cost win, and a process change you have to make deliberately.
Deploy on locked-down machines
Windows releases ship as MSI and as portable ZIP. Portable archives are usually the practical answer on managed estates without admin rights, and on Linux the AppImage needs no package install. Verify each against the release's SHA256SUMS.txt before rollout, and pin the version you tested.