Working with Files in Highlight

Highlight works directly with your local files, enabling multiple capabilities to make your work easier. Attach a spreadsheet, PDF, or Word doc and ask Highlight to edit, merge, or create what you need, no copying content into another app required. Available now on macOS.

Attach and Read a File or Folder

The power of this capability begins with attaching a local file, spreadsheet, PDF, Word doc, or image directly to a chat or task.
Highlight reads the individual files or folder’s contents and can reference or act on them.

The easiest way to get started is to begin a new chat. Use the + button and select Attach File or Attach Folder. From there, give a specific request to Highlight to see how it works.

Here are a few example operations that Highlight can perform:

• Summarize the content of multiple documents

• Combine separate files into one document.

• Work with codebases: Highlight can search, read, and edit files across a codebase folder.

Create a new file

It’s simple to ask Highlight to generate a document from a prompt or from content in attached files.

Within chat, just tell Highlight what you want created. Once completed, you’ll have a chance to review and create a new file (spreadsheet, PDF, Word doc, etc.) that’s saved locally and ready to use.

Edit and Merge files

Once you’ve attached files or folders, you can ask Highlight to update, combine, or reformat an attached file. For example, if you have content in multiple PDFs, and you want to remove some content while combining the files, just tell Highlight your goals and it will take care of the tedious work.

Highlight only touches what you explicitly share, makes the change in place through its sandboxed code layer, and returns the result directly to you.

Supported file formats

Example file formats include: Spreadsheets, PDFs, and Word Documents. Here are a few details:

• Perform work with PDFs: read, extract text, merge/select/rotate pages, and edit text. Note that the PDF format doesn't lend itself well to editing, since PDFs are closer to images than Word Docs.

• Work with Microsoft Office files: Word, PPTX, XLSX. Word has the most complete editing support. PowerPoint and Excel work, with more limited editing.

• If you have integrations enabled, you’re also able to create new files in your connected apps. For example, if you receive Excel files from a partner, but want to work with them in Google Sheets, it’s simple to combine the Excel files and create a new document, all with one prompt.

• Other popular integrations include Google Docs and Notion.

• If your preferred file formats is not supported, please let us know by requesting an integration here.

FAQs

What platform are these features available on?

The edit/merge/create features are only available on macOS and are not currently available for Windows.

Is there a file size limit?

Attached text must total under 1.9 MB. This means that attaching too many text-heavy documents can create an error. Start with fewer attachments, and add more incrementally if you encounter an error.

Can you create or edit images?

Highlight can’t generate or edit images, but it can resize them.

What type of files won’t work well?

Documents and PDFs with signatures have edge case limitations, and might fail to edit/merge correctly.

What if my file fails to upload?

If your preferred file format is not supported, request additional formats here.

Why is Highlight asking for folder access again?

Highlight doesn’t keep access to a folder between chats. Attach it again when you need it.