Skills: the thing making Claude produce real PowerPoints

You asked Claude to turn a pile of meeting notes into a PowerPoint and it just did — with actual formatted slides, your headings in the right places, bullet points where bullet points belong. You did not teach it how a PowerPoint file is structured. You did not upload a template. Something else is going on behind the scenes, and that something is called Skills.

A Skill is a folder of instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude loads dynamically to improve performance on a specialised task. Think of it as an expertise package — Claude picks it up when it is relevant to what you are asking, and sets it down when the task is done. You have already been using Skills without knowing it every time Claude created an Excel spreadsheet, a Word document, a PowerPoint deck, or a PDF.

Two kinds of skills

There are two categories you will run into.

Anthropic Skills are built and maintained by Anthropic. They cover the common high-value tasks: generating Excel spreadsheets with working formulas, Word documents, PowerPoint decks, and PDFs. They are available to all paid users, and Claude invokes them automatically when relevant — you do not do anything special to use them.

Custom Skills are ones you or your organisation create for specialised workflows. A brand voice review. A compliance checklist. A quarterly variance analysis methodology. A meeting-note formatter. If it is a repeatable process you want Claude to follow the same way every time, it is a candidate for a custom Skill.

The two categories share the same mental model: a package of instructions that Claude can load on demand. The difference is who builds the package.

Step 1: Enable Skills in settings

Skills are currently a feature preview on Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans. To use them, Claude needs its secure sandboxed computing environment turned on, which is the same capability that powers code execution and file creation.

To enable Skills:

1. Go to Settings → Capabilities.
2. Make sure Code execution and file creation is toggled on.
3. Scroll down to the Skills section.
4. Toggle the individual Skills you want on or off.

On Enterprise plans, an organisation Owner has to enable Code execution and Skills in Admin settings before individual members can use them. On Team plans, the feature preview is enabled by default at the organisation level.

Step 2: Use a built-in Skill (without thinking about it)

Once Skills are enabled, you do not usually think about them. Claude chooses the right Skill for the task automatically. Try any of these prompts in a fresh chat:

• "Create an Excel spreadsheet tracking monthly expenses with formulas for totals."
• "Turn these meeting notes into a PowerPoint presentation."
• "Generate a PDF report summarising this data."
• "Build a financial model in Excel with scenario analysis."

When Claude uses a Skill you will see it mentioned in Claude's chain of thought as it works. The output is a downloadable file you can save locally or directly to Google Drive. Uploading existing files works too — drop in an .xlsx, .pptx, .docx, or .pdf and Claude can analyse it, create a new version with changes, or produce something new derived from it. (Note: in Chat, Claude creates a new version of the document rather than editing the original in place.)

Important. To use these capabilities Claude may need limited network access — toggle Allow limited network access on when prompted.

Step 3: Plan a custom Skill of your own

The built-in Skills cover document creation. The real power shows up when you create Skills for your repeatable workflows — the things you do the same way every week.

The easiest way to create a custom Skill is through conversation with Claude itself. You do not write code or manually build files. Here is the flow:

1. Start a new chat and tell Claude what you want to build. "I want to create a skill for writing quarterly business reviews" or "I need a skill that applies our brand guidelines to presentations."
2. Answer Claude's questions. Claude will interview you about your workflow — what the skill should do, what good output looks like, when you would use it, and any rules that always apply.
3. Upload reference materials if you have them. Templates, style guides, brand assets, examples of past work you were happy with. The more concrete the better.
4. Save your skill. When finished, Claude generates a file containing your properly structured Skill. You save it and Claude can immediately use it.
5. See your Skills. Open the Customize tab in the left sidebar to view every Skill available to you. You can edit them manually or through conversation whenever you want to improve them.

From that point on, Claude will automatically invoke your custom Skill whenever you work on a matching task. No manual triggering. No copy-pasting the rules every time.

A security note

Because Skills can include executable code, use them thoughtfully.

• Only install custom Skills from sources you trust.
• Anthropic's built-in Skills are tested and maintained by Anthropic.
• Custom Skills you upload yourself are private to your account.
• If you install a custom Skill from an external source, review its contents before use so you understand what it does.

Treat Skills the way you would treat any other installable tool — the convenience is only worth it if you know where the code came from.

Skills vs. Projects — how they fit together

You might be wondering: if both Skills and Projects give Claude more context, when do I use each? The short answer:

Projects store knowledge. Skills perform tasks.

• Projects are knowledge hubs. They hold the reference materials Claude should understand — specs, meeting notes, brand guidelines, research. Upload once, referenced across every chat in the project.
• Skills are procedural machines. They encode how Claude should do a task — the steps, the order, the methodology — so the work is consistent every time.

The two features complement each other. A custom customer call prep Skill can reference customer profiles stored in a Project knowledge base. The Project provides the what (information). The Skill provides the how (process).

| | Projects | Skills | |---|---|---| | Purpose | Store knowledge Claude references | Define processes Claude executes | | Best for | Long-term context, reference material, team collaboration | Repeatable workflows, multi-step tasks, consistent methodology | | Example | Client account hub, research desk, campaign workspace | Brand voice review, QBR drafting, PDF generation | | Persistence | Knowledge available across every chat in the project | Instructions applied whenever the Skill is invoked |

Before you move on

Pick one task you repeat on a weekly or monthly cadence — a report, a review, a handover, a piece of structured content. That is your first candidate for a custom Skill.