Documents and Artifacts Skills

Every skill in this guide is Codex only — they ship in Codex plugins and produce a concrete artifact (a document, workbook, deck, PDF, template, or visualization) inside the Codex container. Reach for them when the deliverable is the file; for prose you keep in the repo see writing, and for figures drawn from research data see /scientific-visualization in research.

• $documents: create, edit, redline, and comment on .docx/Word/Google-Docs artifacts with a render-and-verify workflow. Pick it for a written document; $Presentations for slides and $Spreadsheets for tabular data.
• $Spreadsheets: create, edit, analyze, and verify standalone .xlsx/.xls/.csv/.tsv workbooks. The file-producing skill; use $excel-live-control instead when a workbook is already open and you are driving it live.
• $excel-live-control: control an already-open Microsoft Excel workbook through the connected session. Pick it for live manipulation of an active sheet, not for generating a file from scratch.
• $Presentations: read, create, or edit PowerPoint / Google Slides decks (PPT, PPTX). For a talk deck built from research, /scientific-slides in research is the specialist alternative.
• $pdf: read, create, inspect, render, and verify PDFs where visual layout matters, including fillable AcroForms.
• $template-creator: create or update a reusable personal Codex artifact-template skill. Pick it when you want to capture a repeatable artifact shape; the skills above produce one-off artifacts.
• $visualize: create visualizations and interactive tools directly in conversation to show how something works or explore "what changes when". Choose it for an explanatory or interactive artifact; a data-library chart belongs in machine learning.