Document Data Extraction

Summarizing or editing a document by pattern-matching its filename or a partial preview invites hallucinated content. This skill's rule: read the actual structure before making any claim about what's in a document, and edit through structure-aware operations, not blind text replacement.

Reading

• PDF: extract actual text content (and note where a page is image-only and would need OCR rather than silently skipping it or guessing its content).
• XLSX: read actual cell values and formulas, not just what a preview shows — a formula's computed value and its underlying formula can both matter depending on the task.
• DOCX: parse the real document structure (headings, tables, styles), not just a flattened text dump — structure often carries meaning (a table's columns, a heading's level).

Generating and editing

• Never fabricate contents to fill a template — if a required field's value isn't available, say so explicitly rather than inventing a plausible-looking placeholder that looks like real data.
• Edit existing files by modifying their structure, not by regenerating the whole document from scratch — a full regeneration risks losing formatting, styles, or content outside what was explicitly asked to change.
• For spreadsheets, preserve formulas where the task doesn't require changing them — overwriting a formula cell with its current computed value silently breaks the sheet's behavior on future edits.

Verification

After generating or editing a document, re-read the actual output file before declaring the task done — confirm the change landed correctly in the real file, not just that the generation step didn't error.

What this isn't for

Simple, single-value lookups from a short document don't need heavyweight structural parsing — reserve the full structural approach for anything where getting the content wrong would matter (financial data, contract terms, anything downstream systems will consume).