document-skills — Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files

← Skills · Official — from Anthropic

Slash command /document-skills

Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files

The four document skills that power Claude's own file creation — `docx`, `xlsx`, `pptx` and `pdf`. Claude stops handing you markdown to reformat and produces the actual Office file, with working formulas, real headings, and page numbers where they belong.

beginner ⏱ ~30-60 min per document View source ↗

In practice

You need a credit memo as a Word file with a table of contents, letterhead and page numbers. Without the skill: Claude writes excellent markdown, you paste it into Word, and you spend forty minutes fixing heading styles. With `document-skills`: you get a .docx that opens correctly the first time. Same for the quarterly model — openpyxl means the spreadsheet arrives with formulas that recalculate, not values frozen at the moment Claude wrote them.

This is the single most useful install on this page for a colleague whose job produces documents rather than code.

Claude is good at the content of a memo and, without help, bad at the file. Ask for a report and you get markdown. You then paste it into Word and rebuild the formatting by hand — which is the part that actually took the time.

document-skills is the bundle Anthropic uses in Claude’s own file-creation feature. Four skills ship together:

Skill	Handles
docx	Word documents and .dotx templates — tables of contents, headings, letterheads, tracked changes, find-and-replace
xlsx	Spreadsheets — live formulas, formatting, charts, and cleaning up messy tabular data
pptx	Decks and .potx templates — building, editing, reading speaker notes
pdf	Reading, extracting tables, merging, splitting, filling forms, OCR on scans

How you actually use it

You don’t type a command. Mention the file and Claude loads the right skill:

Read Q3-provisions.xlsx, find the rows where the coverage ratio dropped more than 5 points, and write me a one-page summary as a Word doc.

That single sentence pulls in xlsx to read and docx to write.

Worth knowing before you install

• Formulas survive. The xlsx skill uses openpyxl, so a spreadsheet arrives with =SUM(...) intact rather than the number it happened to evaluate to.
• Editing an existing file is a different path from creating one. The skill knows this; you don’t have to.
• Check the licence line above if you’re thinking about anything beyond normal use in Claude Code.

Access

Public — no access request needed. See the licensing caveat in the Access panel.

Get this skill running

Copy-paste into Claude Code. The marketplace + install steps run once per machine; the last one is how you call the skill day-to-day.

1. 1 Access

   Public — no access request needed. One caveat worth knowing: unlike most of the anthropics/skills repo, these four are source-available, not open source. Each ships a LICENSE.txt putting them under your existing Anthropic Commercial or Consumer Terms, and it explicitly forbids retaining copies outside the Services or making derivative works. Installing and using them inside Claude Code is exactly the intended use; lifting the prompt text into an internal tool is not.

2. 2 Add the marketplace — once per machine

   /plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills

3. 3 Install the skill

   /plugin install document-skills@anthropic-agent-skills

4. 4 Use it

   /document-skills

Next skill →

doubt-driven-development — a second opinion that hasn't seen the first

Before a non-trivial decision stands, it spawns a fresh-context reviewer whose job is to disprove it rather than approve it. Catches the failure where a long session quietly promotes an assumption into a fact nobody re-checked.

Open it → Back to all skills