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Skills in Claude.ai extend Claude’s capabilities for specialized tasks like document creation, data analysis, and workflow automation. Paid plan users can access Anthropic’s pre-built skills and upload their own custom skills.

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Available pre-built skills

All example skills from the Anthropic skills repository are available to paid plans in Claude.ai. These skills are automatically accessible and activate when relevant to your conversation.

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Document skills

Production-grade document processing capabilities:
  • Excel (xlsx): Create spreadsheets, perform calculations, generate charts, and analyze tabular data
  • Word (docx): Generate formatted documents with styles, tables, images, and headers/footers
  • PowerPoint (pptx): Build presentations with slides, layouts, charts, and animations
  • PDF: Read and extract text/tables, merge/split files, fill forms, add watermarks, and apply OCR

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Creative and design skills

  • Algorithmic Art: Generate procedural graphics and visualizations
  • Canvas Design: Create visual layouts and design compositions
  • Frontend Design: Build modern UI components and interfaces
  • Theme Factory: Develop consistent visual themes with color palettes and typography
  • Slack GIF Creator: Generate animated GIFs optimized for Slack

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Development and technical skills

  • MCP Builder: Create Model Context Protocol servers for API integrations
  • Web Artifacts Builder: Build interactive web components and tools
  • Webapp Testing: Systematically test web application functionality
  • Skill Creator: Design, evaluate, and improve custom skills with benchmarking

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Enterprise and communication skills

  • Brand Guidelines: Apply consistent branding standards across materials
  • Internal Communications: Draft newsletters, announcements, FAQs, and company updates
  • Doc Coauthoring: Collaborate on document creation with structured workflows
These skills are the same implementations used in Claude.ai’s core document features. They demonstrate production-quality patterns for building robust skills.

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Using pre-built skills

Skills activate automatically based on your conversation context. You don’t need to explicitly enable or configure them.
1

Describe your task naturally

Simply ask Claude to perform a task that a skill supports:
Create a PowerPoint presentation about Q1 sales results with 5 slides
Claude will automatically activate the pptx skill if available.
2

Reference specific file types

Mention file formats to trigger relevant skills:
Extract all tables from the research-paper.pdf file
The pdf skill activates when you mention .pdf files or PDF-related operations.
3

Explicitly request a skill

You can also name skills directly:
Use the Excel skill to analyze sales data and create a pivot table

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How skills are triggered

Each skill includes a description that helps Claude determine when to activate it. For example:
  • PDF skill: “Use this skill whenever the user wants to do anything with PDF files. This includes reading or extracting text/tables from PDFs, combining or merging multiple PDFs into one, splitting PDFs apart, rotating pages, adding watermarks, creating new PDFs, filling PDF forms, encrypting/decrypting PDFs, extracting images, and OCR on scanned PDFs to make them searchable.”
  • MCP Builder: “Guide for creating high-quality MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers that enable LLMs to interact with external services through well-designed tools. Use when building MCP servers to integrate external APIs or services, whether in Python (FastMCP) or Node/TypeScript (MCP SDK).”
These descriptions ensure skills activate in the right contexts without requiring manual selection.

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Uploading custom skills

Paid plan users can upload their own custom skills to extend Claude’s capabilities with organization-specific knowledge and workflows.
For detailed instructions on uploading custom skills, see Using skills in Claude in the Claude support documentation.

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Creating a custom skill

Skills are folders containing a SKILL.md file with YAML frontmatter and markdown instructions: 
---
name: my-custom-skill
description: Description of what this skill does and when Claude should use it
---

# My Custom Skill

Instructions that Claude will follow when this skill is active.

## Process

1. First step
2. Second step
3. Third step

## Guidelines

- Important guideline 1
- Important guideline 2

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Skill structure requirements

Every skill must include:
  • name: Unique identifier (lowercase, hyphens for spaces)
  • description: Complete description of what the skill does and when to use it
  • Instructions: Markdown content with guidelines, examples, and workflows
The description is critical for triggering accuracy. Include:
  • What the skill does
  • When Claude should use it
  • Relevant keywords and contexts

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Best practices for custom skills

  1. Write comprehensive descriptions: Include all contexts where the skill should activate. Claude tends to “undertrigger” skills, so make descriptions slightly “pushy” with multiple triggering keywords.
  2. Keep SKILL.md concise: Aim for under 500 lines in the main file. For larger skills, use reference files and guide Claude to load them as needed.
  3. Provide clear examples: Show concrete input/output examples so Claude understands the expected format.
  4. Test thoroughly: Create test prompts and verify the skill behaves correctly across different phrasings and edge cases.
  5. Use progressive disclosure:
    • Metadata (name + description): Always in context (~100 words)
    • SKILL.md body: Loaded when skill triggers (<500 lines ideal)
    • Bundled resources: Loaded as needed (unlimited size)

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Example: Brand guidelines skill

Here’s how the brand guidelines skill is structured: 
---
name: brand-guidelines
description: Apply your company's brand guidelines including colors, fonts, 
  tone of voice, and visual standards to any content. Use when creating 
  marketing materials, presentations, documents, or any branded content.
---

# Brand Guidelines

Apply consistent branding across all materials.

## Color Palette

Primary colors:
- Brand Blue: #0066CC
- Brand Gray: #333333

Secondary colors:
- Accent Orange: #FF6B35
- Light Gray: #F5F5F5

## Typography

- Headings: Inter Bold
- Body text: Inter Regular
- Code: Roboto Mono

## Tone of Voice

- Professional but approachable
- Clear and concise
- Avoid jargon unless necessary

## Logo Usage

See assets/logo-guidelines.pdf for spacing and placement rules.

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Skill limitations

Skills in Claude.ai have some platform-specific limitations:
  • Skills cannot execute arbitrary code (use scripts in bundled resources instead)
  • File access is limited to uploaded files in the conversation
  • Network requests require explicit user permission
  • Skills are conversation-scoped (don’t persist across conversations)

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Getting help

For more information about using skills in Claude.ai:

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