Expertise is now a file you download
Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork reads custom skills — plain SKILL.md files — from your OneDrive. Drop one in, start a conversation, and Cowork follows the procedure like it's done your job for years. Each skill below is a tested procedure with install steps and tuning notes. Free to download, yours to adapt.
2. In OneDrive, open /Documents/Cowork/skills/ — create it if it doesn't exist.
3. Create a subfolder named after the skill (e.g. weekly-status-report).
4. Put SKILL.md inside. That's it — Cowork discovers it at the start of your next conversation.
Limits: 50 custom skills, 1 MB per SKILL.md, up to 20 companion files (10 MB total) per skill.
Weekly Status Report
Turns Friday's most-hated chore into a two-minute review. Cowork gathers your sent mail, meetings, and edited files, then writes the report in a fixed, inflation-proof format.
▸ Kills the 45-minute Friday memory-reconstruction ritual — and the report gets more honest, not less.
meetingsMeeting Debrief
Turns any meeting into four honest lists — decisions quoted verbatim, action items with real owners, open questions, risks — plus a 6-line follow-up that waits for your approval before it goes anywhere.
▸ The follow-up email that everyone agrees should exist and nobody sends — written in 90 seconds, from the transcript, not from memory.
communicationInbox Triage
Triage by exception, not summary. Cowork surfaces only the mail that needs a decision, carries a deadline, or comes from your management chain — with a recommended action and a draft reply — and compresses everything else into one paragraph.
▸ Replaces 40 minutes of inbox archaeology with one screen: the 5 messages that matter, what to do about each, and a one-paragraph funeral for the rest.
documentsDeck Doctor
Turns a Word doc or a rough deck into a real presentation the disciplined way: three narrative arcs proposed first, one idea per slide, 8-word bullets, depth pushed to speaker notes, zero AI images. Output is a PPTX in OneDrive, waiting for your template.
▸ Gets you Copilot's genuinely good doc-to-deck capability without the genuinely bad default output — wall-of-text slides and that unmistakable AI-art sheen.
analysisWorkbook Auditor
Points Cowork at any Excel workbook and gets back an honest audit: what each sheet does, where the formulas end and the hardcoded overrides begin, which merged cells and mixed types will break analysis — plus a prioritized cleanup proposal it never executes itself.
▸ Finds the typed-over formula and the SUM that stopped at row 500 before they find their way into a board number.
communicationAnnouncement Comms Pack
One brief in, four consistent artifacts out: a 150-word exec email, a skimmable Teams post, an FAQ that only answers from the brief, and a single summary slide. Facts cross-checked, gaps marked [NEEDS INPUT], everything saved as drafts — nothing sent.
▸ Kills the half-day of writing the same announcement four ways — and the week of confusion when the four versions disagree on the date.