Claude Skills: installable superpowers
Skills turn Claude into a specialist: perfect documents, your company's processes, your writing style. Discover what they are, how they work and which ones to install.
What is a skill?
A skill is a folder of instructions, scripts and resources that Claude loads automatically when the task requires it. Think of it as an "expert manual" Claude consults at exactly the right moment: ask for an Excel file and it reads the spreadsheet skill; ask for a PDF and it reads the PDF one; if your company has a specific process for writing reports, Claude follows your process.
The key: skills take up no context until they're needed. Claude only sees the name and description; when the task matches, it loads the full content. Anthropic calls this progressive disclosure.
xlsx — Excel
Spreadsheets with formulas, professional formatting, pivot tables and charts. The most used official skill.
Officialdocx — Word
Word documents with tables of contents, headers, page numbers, tracked changes and comments.
Officialpptx — PowerPoint
Complete presentations with templates, layouts and speaker notes ready to present.
Officialpdf — PDF
Extract text and tables, create new PDFs, merge and split documents, fill in forms.
Officialdataviz — Visualization
Elegant, accessible charts and dashboards with validated palettes and consistent design rules.
Officialmy-writing-style
Claude learns your writing style so emails and documents sound like you, not like an AI.
CustomizableSkills vs. Connectors vs. Plugins: the difference in 30 seconds
| Concept | What it provides | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Skill | Teaches Claude how to do something (knowledge and procedure) | "This is how you build a perfect financial Excel" |
| Connector (MCP) | Gives Claude access to external tools and data | Reading your Gmail, creating a GitHub issue |
| Plugin | Bundles skills + connectors + commands into one installable | A "Marketing" plugin with everything included |
| Subagent | A specialized Claude working in parallel within a task | A code-review agent |
How a skill gets triggered
You don't need to do anything special: describe your task naturally. If you say "make me a presentation about Q2 sales", Claude detects it needs the pptx skill, reads it and applies its best practices. You can also invoke them explicitly by typing /skill-name in Claude Code or Cowork.
Where to get more skills
- Official Anthropic skills — included in Claude, Claude Code and Cowork (documents, spreadsheets, PDFs…).
- Plugin marketplaces — collections installable with one command, many of them free.
- GitHub — repositories like awesome-claude-code gather hundreds of community skills. We've curated them in our GitHub section.
- Your own — building a skill is easier than you think: follow our step-by-step guide.
Build your first skill today
No code, in under 10 minutes, with our guide.