Prerequisites

Technically, the prerequisites for installing and using Red Ink are:

• Word, Excel and Outlook (only “classic”, not the “new” Outlook) for Windows, Version M365 or Office 2019 and newer (but not MacOS);
• Security settings that allow the use of COM/VSTO-Add-ins; make sure they are whitelisted and will get loaded even if they cause a short delay in loading (this is particularly relevant for Outlook)
• If you want to run the local helper for Word and Excel (they contain VBA macros; optional; they are necessary for context menus, keyboard shortcuts and the API within Excel), then you need to make sure that they can run and will not be put into quarantine by your anti-malware solution (they may generate false alarms)
• The main LLM you use must be sufficiently advanced to make full use of all features (we get very good results with Google Gemini 2.5 Pro, but GPT 5.1 works well, too); weaker models (in particular open source models) work fine for basic functionality, but more complex requests (such as using “Bubbles:” oder “Slides:”, completing Excel forms, automatic redactions, Regex markups, or chatbot interactions with documents) may not work satisfactorily
• For audio features (transcriptions, audio generation) with a good quality Google Vertex AI (speech-to-text) and Google Vertex AI or OpenAI (text-to-speech) is needed
• You can configure many additional “alternate” models (e.g., Perplexity, Deep Research) to allow the user to choose the best model for their purpose/task; we also recommend to offer “thinking” or “reasoning” models for certain tasks
• You can also configure third party or internal content services, such as RAG services or legal databases services (e.g., Lexi Search) – provided they have a JSON REST API
• If you want to make use of a central configuration, you need a shared network drive and the ability to set-up a registry entry that will be available on all relevant client computers

For more information, see the manual, which you can get here.