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Plugins

Install the XL Marinade plugin in your editor. This takes 2 minutes and only needs to be done once.

Prerequisites

Before you start, confirm you have:

  • XL Marinade installed — uv add xl-marinade or pip install xl-marinade
  • One of these editors: Claude Code, VS Code with GitHub Copilot, or Cursor

Install the Plugin

Run these two commands once in your terminal — the first registers the marketplace, the second installs the plugin and its skill:

/plugin marketplace add gaspatchio/xl-marinade
/plugin install xl-marinade@xl-marinade

Agent Plugins is a preview feature — enable it with "chat.plugins.enabled": true first. Then add the XL Marinade marketplace to your settings.json:

{
  "chat.plugins.marketplaces": ["gaspatchio/xl-marinade"]
}

Open the Extensions view, filter with @agentPlugins, and install xl-marinade.

Cursor isn't on the plugin marketplace yet, so install the skill directly:

npx skills add gaspatchio/xl-marinade

On Windows, add --copy — symlinks need Developer Mode:

npx skills add gaspatchio/xl-marinade --copy

(Cursor only auto-detects .cursor-plugin/ inside the xl-marinade repository itself; for your own project, use the command above.)

For any agent that supports the Agent Skills standard:

npx skills add gaspatchio/xl-marinade

On Windows, add --copy — symlinks need Developer Mode.

Clone the repository locally. Your editor will auto-detect the plugin directories when you open the project.

Verify It Works

Run a quick check from the terminal:

marinade --help

If you see the extract, document, and diff commands, XL Marinade is installed. Then open your editor and describe a task:

"I have an Excel workbook. Help me map what drives its outputs with XL Marinade."

If the response reaches for marinade extract and queries the agent_* views, the plugin is working.

What You Just Installed

Component Description
1 skill using-xl-marinade — extract a workbook to SQLite, query the agent_* views, audit dependencies, and diff versions
How it loads The agent invokes the skill when your request matches its description — you don't name it or run commands

For what the skill covers and example prompts, see Skills.

Next Steps

Hand this to your team. They don't need to run any commands — just open their editor and start working with a workbook.

See Skills for what to describe.