You might find yourself trying to create a PDF in drafts only to get markdown text, or wondering why your agent can't perform precise calculations on your spreadsheet data. This article explains what each feature does, what problems they solve, and how to choose the right tool for your needs.
The Problem
Since only one of these can be enabled in an Agent's configurations, understanding which to use is important. Drafts and Power Tools solve different problems in complementary ways.
What Are Drafts?
Drafts provide a dedicated workspace for creating and refining content alongside your chat conversation. When you ask your agent to write an email, create a report, or generate code, drafts give you a clean, focused environment separate from the chat window.
What Problems Do Drafts Solve?
Iterative content creation - You need to write something, review it, make changes, and refine it multiple times. Doing this in the chat window means scrolling through conversation history and losing track of versions.
Focused editing - You want to work on your content without the distraction of ongoing chat messages, with a clear view of just the document you're creating.
Version control - You need to experiment with different versions of your content or revert to earlier drafts without cluttering your conversation.
Structured content - You're creating longer documents, code files, or spreadsheets that benefit from a dedicated editor rather than a chat response.
What Can You Create with Drafts?
elvex can generate two types of drafts:
Text documents - Emails, reports, articles, blog posts, letters, proposals, code files, or any written content. These use a rich text editor that supports formatting, headers, lists, and markdown.
Tables - Tabular data that can be viewed, edited, and analyzed in a table editor. You can copy the data or download it as a CSV file.
What Drafts Cannot Do
While drafts are powerful for content creation and give users a document-editing experience, they have important limitations:
Text and tables only - drafts cannot create PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, Excel files with formulas, or Word documents
No complex file formats - You get markdown text or CSV data, not professionally formatted deliverables
Limited data processing - drafts don't execute code or perform calculations; they display content the agent generates
No computational work - drafts can't analyze large datasets, run statistical calculations, or process files programmatically
If you need any of these capabilities, you need Power Tools instead.
What Are Power Tools?
Power Tools transform your agent from a conversational partner into a capable worker that can execute code, process data, and create professional deliverables. When you enable Power Tools, your agent gains access to a secure computational environment (a Linux sandbox) and a library of specialized Agent Skills.
What Problems Do Power Tools Solve?
Professional deliverables - You need finished products that you can download, share, and use immediately: PDFs with embedded charts, Excel spreadsheets with working formulas, PowerPoint presentations, or Word documents with proper formatting.
Large-scale data processing - You have datasets with thousands or hundreds of thousands of rows that exceed the context window limits of a language model. You need to filter, analyze, aggregate, or transform this data programmatically.
Complex file operations - You need to convert data between formats, merge multiple files, extract specific information from documents, or perform operations that require computational logic rather than text generation.
When to Use Power Tools
You should use Power Tools when you need to:
Create professional PDFs with charts, formatting, and embedded graphics
Generate Excel spreadsheets with formulas, multiple sheets, or conditional formatting
Build PowerPoint presentations or Word documents
Perform precise calculations on financial, scientific, or statistical data
Convert data between formats (CSV to JSON, Excel to CSV, etc.)
Merge or process multiple data files
Extract insights from large documents or datasets
What Power Tools Cannot Do
Power Tools are designed for computational work and file generation, not iterative content refinement:
Not for simple text editing - If you just need to write and refine an email or article, drafts provide a faster, simpler experience
Requires clear specifications - Power Tools work best when you can describe exactly what you need; they're not ideal for exploratory writing
Focused on deliverables - Power Tools create finished products; if you want to iterate on content in a workspace, use Drafts
Choosing Between Drafts and Power Tools
Common Scenarios
"I need to write a report for my team" → Use drafts for a clean writing and editing experience
"I need a PDF report with sales charts" → Use Power Tools to generate a professional PDF with embedded visualizations
"I want to draft a blog post about our product" → Use drafts to write and refine your content iteratively
"I need to analyze this 50,000-row CSV file" → Use Power Tools to process the data programmatically
"I'm writing Python code for a project" → Use drafts to create and edit your code in a dedicated editor
"I need an Excel budget template with formulas" → Use Power Tools to create a functional spreadsheet with calculations
"I want to create a proposal document" → Use drafts for a text-based proposal, or Power Tools if you need a formatted Word document
"I need to merge three data files and create visualizations" → Use Power Tools for data processing and chart generation
Using These Features Together
Drafts and Power Tools are complementary, not competing features. You can use them within the same conversation in the Home agent.