Skills: Teach It Your Way of Working

A skill is a folder of instructions — at minimum a file describing when it applies and how to do the job — that Claude loads automatically when a task matches. "Weekly report" skill: where the data lives, the exact section order, the tone, who it goes to. Once it exists, "do the weekly report" is a complete prompt, and the output is consistent every single time. Skills follow your account across surfaces — the same skill works in Cowork, in chat, and inside the Excel add-in.

The best part: you don't write skills by hand. When a session produces exactly what you wanted, say "turn what we just did into a skill for next time" — Claude drafts the skill from the working session, you review it, done. Your best one-off results become your permanent standard operating procedures.

Think of skills as the difference between a new temp and a trained assistant. Prompts train the temp every morning; skills are the training binder. Teams on Team/Enterprise plans can share them, which is how one person's great workflow becomes the whole team's default.