For future consideration, perhaps you could convert the Word documents to Markdown and then export to Word if you need to print them or hand them off to others. I have found, as I posted here, that AIs work natively and therefore faster with Markdown files, and, I presume, burn fewer tokens.
Appendix;
After I wrote the above, I asked Claude if my assumption was correct. Here is its response:
Native format. Markdown is effectively native for Claude. It is plain text with lightweight syntax that Claude reads and generates directly. Word documents (.docx) are zipped XML packages that must be parsed before Claude can read them and reconstructed when written back. So yes, Markdown is the format Claude works in most naturally.
Speed. For editing tasks, Markdown is faster end-to-end. There is no conversion step on either side, fewer places for formatting to go wrong, and the round-trip is a simple text read and write. With .docx files, each read and write involves extraction and repackaging, which adds latency and occasional formatting hiccups (stray styles, lost comments, altered spacing).
Tokens. This is where the nuance matters. Tokens are counted on the text content itself, not the file wrapper. A paragraph of prose costs roughly the same number of tokens whether it arrived as Markdown or was extracted from a .docx. Where Markdown actually saves tokens:
- No inherited Word styling artifacts (tracked-change residue, inconsistent smart quotes, invisible formatting runs) that sometimes get pulled into the text stream.
- Simpler syntax for structure (
#versus a heading style) when structure needs to be represented in text.- Cleaner diffs when Claude returns edits, which means fewer tokens spent re-emitting boilerplate.
The savings are real but usually modest, not dramatic. The larger practical wins are speed, fidelity, and fewer formatting surprises.
Bottom line. For a writer’s workflow, batching edits in Markdown and exporting to Word only when a recipient requires it is the right call. The user gains speed and reliability and loses nothing that Word offers at the editing stage.