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Anthropic Skills

Anthropic's own skill library, including the Word, PDF, PowerPoint and Excel skills behind Claude's document features.

Before you start:
  • Claude Code, or a paid Claude.ai plan
Setup
2 min
Level
Beginner
Stars
180k
Anthropic Skills screenshot

What it does

A skill is a folder of instructions, scripts and resources that Claude loads when a task calls for it, so it does that task the same reliable way every time.

This is Anthropic's own collection. It covers creative work (art, music, design), technical tasks (testing web apps, building MCP servers) and business work (communications, branding). It also includes the document skills for Word, PDF, PowerPoint and Excel files that power Claude's file creation, plus a template for writing your own.

Install it

  1. Open Claude Code.
  2. Add the repo as a plugin marketplace with the first command below.
  3. Install the document skills, the example skills, or both, with the next two commands.
  4. Prefer menus? Choose Browse and install plugins, then anthropic-agent-skills, then document-skills or example-skills, then Install now.

Add the marketplace

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills

Install the skill sets

Claude Code
/plugin install document-skills@anthropic-agent-skills
/plugin install example-skills@anthropic-agent-skills

Use it

  1. Mention the skill in your request. For example: "Use the PDF skill to extract the form fields from path/to/some-file.pdf".
  2. On Claude.ai, these example skills are already available on paid plans. To upload your own, follow Anthropic's Using skills in Claude guide (linked below).
  3. To make your own skill, copy the template folder: it is a SKILL.md file with a name and a description at the top, then your instructions.

Good to know

Anthropic says these skills are for demonstration and education, and the behavior you get in Claude may differ. Test them before you rely on them.

Many skills here are open source (Apache 2.0). The docx, pdf, pptx and xlsx skills are source-available, not open source.

Links

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