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Content freshness: 02.05.2026
- personal space to collect information and examples about Copilot Cowork and Custom Skills
- my laboratory, happy if it helps anyone else - interested in or would like to xchange? Reach out.
- The content reflects personal experience, hands-on experimentation, and individual interpretation of the current product behavior.
- It is not an official Microsoft reference and should not be treated as authoritative product documentation.
- All observations are based on the author’s understanding at the time of writing and may evolve as the products change.
- Copilot Cowork is currently a Frontier feature and is developing rapidly. Functionality, availability, and integration patterns may change quickly and without prior notice.
If you are - just like me - wondering when to use what think about skills like
- Have no persona
- Introduce no conversational mode switch
- Keep the user focused on their task, not the architecture
What I totally love when interacting with CoWork:
- no endless re-generation: especially when reworking documents or setting up comms, it only changes parts and does not completely generate for new
- you can uopload zip files with consolidated information, it unpacks and parses
- it can parse websites, give it an address and it does the job
- it's real co-creation based on what you feed
- it does the work, calls skills as needed and only raises hands when a human interaction or decision is needed
- Custom Skills are a real gamechanger, looking at my daily work, there is so much potential!
- NEW Custom skill DailyOps - Personal daily-operations system as a Cowork Custom Skill — tasks, customers, stakeholders, and a mail-capture loop for customer-facing roles.
- Memory and Context Window experiences
- Follow this link to compare Chat to Skill to Agent
- Learn about the Basics of Custom Skills and why they are not 1:1 compareable to Claude skills
- Check in here for the two options to add Custom Ckills and run quality checks for accuracy
- CoWork Announcement
- CoWork Overview
- CoWork FAQ
- CoWork OOTB Skills
- Microsoft 365 Frontier Program
- Official Microsoft Roadmap
- HIGHLIGHT: Check out the Cowork Collective Contents for fun & action
**Skill What it does**
Word Create and edit Word documents.
Excel Create and edit Excel spreadsheets.
PowerPoint Create and edit PowerPoint presentations.
PDF Work with PDF documents.
Email Compose, reply, forward, and send emails. Save drafts and manage attachments.
Scheduling Schedule meetings.
Calendar Management Create events using natural language, add Teams meeting links, and manage your calendar.
Meetings Prepare meeting intelligence.
Daily Briefing Prepare your daily briefing.
Enterprise Search Search across your organization.
Deep Research Conducts in-depth research across multiple sources to compile comprehensive answers and analysis on complex topics.
Communications Draft stakeholder communications.
Adaptive Cards Generates interactive card-based responses with structured layouts, buttons, and data displays in the conversation.
- You can create custom skills right from Cowork itself
- Just use the /skill skill 😄 it guides you through the process and helps setting things up
If you are interested in adding additional skills manually, have a look on the Custom Skills page