office-transform

# 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: ```selection-ref {"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`. **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 ...