Claude comes with six skills worth switching on this week. Four handle the files a small business sends out every day: spreadsheets, Word documents, slide decks and PDFs. The other two help you shape Claude around your own business.
If skills are new to you, start with why they beat a longer prompt. Anthropic provides pre-built skills for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF work, and publishes more in its public skills repository.
For each one below: what it does out of the box, where a small business feels it, and what it still doesn’t know about you.
1. Excel: spreadsheets that come back finished
What it does: Builds and edits spreadsheets with working formulas, formatting and charts, instead of a table pasted into a chat.
Where a small business feels it: A consultant who rebuilds the same project budget for every new client can hand Claude last quarter’s numbers or a messy export and get back a clean workbook with the totals calculated and the chart drawn.
What it doesn’t know about you: Your column names, your categories, how you price, and which numbers your accountant asks for.
2. Word: proposals and documents in a file you can send
What it does: Creates and edits Word documents with proper headings, tables and formatting, and can work with tracked changes.
Where a small business feels it: Proposals, engagement letters, client reports, SOPs. Anything you currently start by opening last month’s version and deleting the old client’s name.
What it doesn’t know about you: Your proposal structure, your terms, the sections you always include, and the order clients expect them in.
3. PowerPoint: decks you’d be glad to present
What it does: Builds and edits slide decks as .pptx files, with layouts, speaker notes and charts.
Where a small business feels it: Asked to give a 20-minute talk at a networking group next Thursday, an advisor can paste the outline, get a working deck, and spend the saved evening on what to say instead of where the boxes go.
What it doesn’t know about you: Your template, your colors, and how you like a slide to look.
4. PDF: the forms and paperwork nobody wants to touch
What it does: Reads, fills, merges, splits and creates PDFs, including pulling tables and text out of them.
Where a small business feels it: Intake forms, vendor applications, signed contracts that need merging, a 40-page report you need three numbers out of.
What it doesn’t know about you: Which fields you fill the same way every time and where your standard answers live.
5. Brand guidelines: on-brand by default
What it does: Applies a set visual identity (colors, fonts, styling) to the documents and decks Claude makes.
Before you rely on it: Anthropic’s example version applies Anthropic’s own colors and fonts. It’s a working template: swap in your hex codes, typefaces and rules, and every deck and document starts on your brand.
What it doesn’t know about you: Your brand, until you give it the details.
6. Skill creator: the skill that builds your skills
What it does: Interviews you about a task you repeat, then writes the skill file for you. You describe how you do the work in plain language, and Claude handles the structure.
Where a small business feels it: This is the one that turns the other five into yours. “Help me build a skill for our proposals” starts a back-and-forth, and no code is involved.
What it doesn’t know about you: Nothing yet. It works from the answers you give it, so the more specific you are, the better the skill.
Why you still have to customize them
Each of these skills is general by design. The Word skill produces a well-formatted proposal, without your sections, your terms, or the scope line you always add. The brand skill ships with Anthropic’s colors to make the same case.
You don’t need to edit Anthropic’s skills to fix that. Build your own skill on top: one that knows your proposal structure and tells Claude to produce it as a Word file, or one that holds your brand and applies it to every deck. The built-in skill takes care of the file format, and your skill carries your standards.
Writing a good skill means putting into words a process you’ve never had to explain: what good looks like, what you always fix, what should never go out the door. It goes faster with someone across the table asking the questions and pushing back when an answer is vague.
How to turn them on
In Claude, go to Settings > Capabilities and turn on Code execution and file creation. The Excel, Word, PowerPoint and PDF skills then come in on their own whenever a task calls for them. For brand guidelines and the skill creator, go to Customize > Skills and switch them on. Then ask for a task in plain words: “build a budget spreadsheet from these numbers” or “use the skill creator to help me build a skill for our proposals.” Team plans have skills on by default; on Enterprise plans, an owner has to enable them for the organization first. Anthropic’s help article on skills has the current steps.
Frequently asked questions
Which Claude skills are built in? Anthropic provides pre-built skills for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files, and publishes example skills, including the skill creator and brand guidelines, in its public skills repository.
Can I edit Anthropic’s built-in skills? You don’t need to. Build your own skills alongside them that hold your templates, terms and brand, and Claude uses both together.
Do I need to code to customize a Claude skill? No. The skill creator builds the skill from a conversation with you.
Build your first skills with someone across the table. Start in a small group with Signal Setup Lab, or go one-on-one with Signal Setup 1:1 and build your first skills on your own work. Either way, you leave knowing how to write the next ones. See Claude training or book a free intro call.
Claude is a trademark of Anthropic. Full Signal is independent and not affiliated with Anthropic.