The 13 Built-In Skills of Cowork

The 13 Built-In Skills of Cowork

Post 4 of 14

Introduction

Cowork’s behavior is organized around skills — packaged capabilities the agent loads on demand. The vocabulary is borrowed from the Agent Skills standard originally developed by Anthropic. As of today, Cowork ships with 13 built-in skills covering the workflows most knowledge workers need.

The Skill Set, Named and Scoped

Per Microsoft Learn, Cowork’s 13 built-in skills are:

1. Word — create and edit Word documents end-to-end.
2. Excel — create and edit spreadsheets, including formulas.
3. PowerPoint — generate decks from content or templates.
4. PDF — produce PDFs, including from other formats.
5. Email — read, draft, and send mail in Outlook (with approval).
6. Scheduling — find times, send invites, manage RSVPs.
7. Calendar Management — review and reorganise calendar entries.
8. Meetings — prepare for meetings, summarise, extract action items.
9. Daily Briefing — assemble a personalized daily overview from email, calendar, and Teams.
10. Enterprise Search — search across your Microsoft 365 environment.
11. Communications — draft audience-tailored updates, announcements, and escalations.
12. Deep Research — multi-step investigation across attached and indexed sources, optionally using the Researcher agent with Critique.
13. Adaptive Cards — render structured outputs as visual cards rather than plain text.

How a skill is invoked. You don’t pick the skill — Cowork does. Each skill registers its name and description in the system prompt at the start of the conversation. When your prompt aligns with a skill’s description, Cowork loads it. You see this happening live: streaming skill messages (“Preparing to create Word documents”) followed by tool steps (“Composing your email”).

Naming the skill explicitly works. If you want a specific skill, mention it: “Use the Deep Research skill to compare these three vendor proposals.”

The Researcher path. Deep Research can route through the Researcher agent with Critique enabled — one model draft, another model from a different provider reviews. This is what produces the 13.8% DRACO improvement over single-model approaches reported by Microsoft.

File outputs. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF skills write files into your OneDrive and SharePoint. They appear in the side panel during the conversation and remain in OneDrive afterward. Use Download All to grab them as a zip.

What is missing today (be honest with users):

• No native skill for Power BI in Cowork.
• No skill for local desktop file manipulation.
• No third-party tool skills (Slack, Jira, Notion) — that is the Anthropic Claude Cowork side of the family tree.

Takeaway

Thirteen skills cover the surface area of most knowledge work in Microsoft 365. Learn what each one does — the next nine posts walk through them in groups, with real prompts.

Sources

• Cowork common questions (Frontier)
• Cowork skills (referenced in FAQ as “Cowork skills”)