Claude Skills for Excel and PowerPoint: How to Use Them

Claude Skills run inside the Claude for Excel and PowerPoint add-ins: any skill you enable in Claude's Customize hub is available in the sidebar automatically, and you can trigger one by hand by typing / in the add-in. Claude picks the relevant skill on its own when your request matches, or you choose one from the slash menu. Both add-ins are generally available on paid Claude plans as of August 2026.

If you already know what Claude Skills are, the Office story is short: the skills you manage once show up where you actually do spreadsheet and deck work, and a few finance-heavy ones come preloaded. This guide covers how skills surface in the add-ins, how to switch them on, what ships by default, how to run one mid-task, and when it's worth authoring your own for a marketing or SEO workflow.

What are Claude Skills, and how do they show up in Office?

A Skill is a packaged procedure Claude loads only when a task needs it: a folder with a SKILL.md file plus optional scripts and reference docs. The point is that you write down a repeatable workflow once instead of re-explaining it every conversation. That mechanism doesn't change inside Excel or PowerPoint. What changes is where the skills are available.

Two kinds of skill matter here. First, the built-in Anthropic skills that make the add-ins work at all. When you ask claude.ai or the add-in to build a spreadsheet or a deck, a document skill is doing the work behind the scenes. Anthropic's Customize hub lists four: "Enhanced Excel spreadsheet creation and manipulation," "PowerPoint presentation generation," "Professional Word document creation," and "PDF creation and processing." Claude applies these automatically when code execution and file creation are on. Per the docs, you don't invoke them explicitly; Claude determines when each is needed based on your request.

Second, the skills you or your organization add. Per Anthropic's docs, any skill you've enabled in your Claude settings is available across the Claude for Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook add-ins. As the March 11, 2026 update put it, every skill already set up in Claude, personal or organization-wide, works inside the add-ins out of the box. You manage them in one hub and they follow you into Office. No separate upload step per app.

How do you turn on Claude Skills for the add-ins?

Two things need to be true: the add-in installed, and the skills you want enabled in your account. Here's the order that works.

Install the add-in. Based on Anthropic's documentation, the self-serve path is:

1. Open the Claude for Microsoft 365 listing on Microsoft AppSource.
2. Select "Get it now" to install.
3. Open Excel or PowerPoint, activate the add-in, and sign in with your Claude account.

Claude appears as a sidebar panel inside the app. On Windows you'll find the add-in under Home, Add-ins; on Mac under Tools, Add-ins. Organization admins deploy it through the Microsoft 365 Admin Center instead, and there's a custom-manifest route for environments where the Office Store is disabled.

One version caveat worth checking before you troubleshoot anything: the add-in needs Excel or PowerPoint on the web, on Windows with a Microsoft 365 subscription (build 16.0.13127.20296 or later), or on Mac (version 16.46 or later). It does not run on Excel 2016 or 2019 perpetual licenses, on iPad, or on Android.

Enable the skills. Skills live in the Customize hub. In Claude, go to Customize > Skills. You'll see Anthropic's own skills alongside anything you or your admin uploaded, each with a description and a toggle. Flip the switch next to a skill to turn it on or off. Skills require code execution enabled on your account; the feature is available on Free, Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans, though the add-ins themselves are paid-plan only.

Because the add-ins read from that same setting, a skill toggled on here is live in Excel and PowerPoint the next time you open the sidebar. There's nothing to configure twice.

What starter skills ship in the add-ins?

Anthropic preloaded a set of finance-oriented starter skills so the add-ins are useful on day one without you authoring anything. The announcement's framing: skills turn best practices into one-click actions. The starter set skews toward investment banking and financial analysis, which tells you who Anthropic built the first batch for.

New skills from the Financial Analysis plugin are available in the add-ins without additional setup, per the same update. If your work isn't finance, these are still a useful reference for what a well-scoped Office skill looks like: each one is a complete task, not a single instruction.

How do you run a skill inside Excel or PowerPoint?

Two ways, and you'll use both.

The default is to say nothing special. Describe your task in plain language and Claude recognizes when a skill applies, the same automatic behavior the built-in document skills use. Ask it to "clean this dataset and flag duplicates" and if a data-cleaning skill is enabled, it uses it.

The explicit way is the slash menu. Type / in the add-in sidebar and Claude shows the skills available for the app you're in. Pick one, for example /deck-check in PowerPoint. Skills that don't apply to the current app are filtered out of that list, so you won't see spreadsheet skills offered while you're in a deck. Reach for the slash command when you want a specific procedure to run and don't want to leave it to Claude's judgment.

That's the whole interaction model. Automatic when you trust the match, explicit with / when you want control. It mirrors how Record a Skill and hand-written skills behave everywhere else Claude runs.

What can Claude actually do in Excel versus PowerPoint?

Skills are the reusable layer on top of what each add-in can do natively. Knowing the base capability tells you what a skill can orchestrate. Here's the split from Anthropic's per-app docs.

Both add-ins share context. A single conversation can span your open workbook, deck, document, and inbox, so analysis you did in Excel is available when you switch to PowerPoint without re-explaining it. Both also let you set persistent Instructions in the sidebar Settings, per app, for formatting conventions like "bold column headers" or brand rules like "use one-line bullets." Those instructions are separate from your skills; think of them as always-on preferences, where a skill is a named procedure you invoke.

Should you build your own skill for a marketing or SEO workflow?

The starter skills are finance-shaped, but the mechanism is general. If your team does the same Office task the same way every week, that's a skill candidate. The test is whether the task is repeatable and has a right way to do it that Claude doesn't know by default.

Concrete fits for a marketing or SEO team:

• Monthly reporting decks. Encode your slide order, chart types, and commentary structure so a "build the August performance deck" prompt returns your format, not a generic one.
• Keyword or content-gap workbooks. A skill that takes an export and produces your standard tab layout, formulas, and conditional formatting every time.
• Competitive snapshots. The comparison-table format you always use, applied to whatever set of competitors you drop in.

You author these the normal way: a SKILL.md folder following Anthropic's structure, packaged as a ZIP and uploaded through the + button in the Customize hub with "Upload a skill." Once it's enabled, it's live in the add-ins alongside everything else. This is the same production discipline behind programmatic SEO, where the whole win is doing a repeatable step identically every time, and it pairs with the on-page work in our LLM SEO guide. For ready-made options before you build, our roundups of the best Claude Skills and Claude Skills for marketing and SEO are the place to start.

One honest note: the preloaded skills lean finance because that's where Anthropic saw the sharpest demand first. Nothing stops you writing marketing skills, but you're writing them, not picking them off a shelf yet.

What should you watch out for?

The add-ins are powerful enough to change real files, which means the cautions are real too.

Review before you finalize. Anthropic's own guidance says Claude for Excel is "not recommended for" final client deliverables without human review or audit-critical calculations without verification. Same posture for PowerPoint. Claude warns you before overwriting existing data, but the judgment is still yours. Start from a trusted copy of the workbook or deck before asking for wide edits.

Trusted files only. Both docs carry a prompt-injection warning: files from external sources (downloaded templates, vendor files, data imports) can hide instructions that try to make Claude extract data or perform destructive actions. When Claude proposes a risky operation, it asks you to confirm. Read those confirmations, especially for anything you didn't create. This is the same supply-chain caution that applies to any skill you install from an unknown source.

It's a moving target. This integration shipped in stages through 2026 and the feature set changes. Treat the specifics here as accurate for August 2026 and check Anthropic's current docs before you build a critical process on one particular behavior.

What to do next

If you're on a paid plan, install the add-in, open Customize > Skills, and confirm the built-in document skills are toggled on. Then try the two invocation paths back to back: ask for something in plain language, then type / and run a skill explicitly. You'll feel the difference immediately, and it tells you which tasks are worth turning into a named skill.

If you're still deciding whether skills are worth the setup at all, start with what Claude Skills are and the progressive-disclosure idea that makes them cheap to keep around. The Office add-ins don't add a new concept. They put the skills you already manage where the spreadsheet and the deck actually live.