AI Skills for Beginners: Your Complete Copilot Tutorial Guide

If you're working with any AI tool at the moment, you'll be coming across this idea of skills. If you're a co-pilot

user, you'll see this popping up in PowerPoint. Choose skills in Excel. Here, choose plugins and skills. When

you build an agent, now there's skills in preview. And when you work with co-work, you've got the option to

customize and manage skills. So, what are skills? What's going on? This is a complete tutorial for you if you are a

user of Copilot and you're not a technical person. I'm going to help you understand what skills are, what the

benefit is, and how you can use and build them for yourself. Let's get started. So, the core concept of a skill

is that it is a repeatable set of instructions or a recipe of some kind that you can give to your agent so that

it does the same thing over and over again. In my family, I'm a little bit famous for making a strawberry

cheesecake. Now, if I went out to everyone watching here and said, "Hey, make me a cheesecake." You might be able

to find a recipe online. You might be able to figure it out for yourselves, but everyone would make something

different. If you just ask an agent or ask an AI to do something for you, it's using its general knowledge or what it

can find on the web to do it in that way. But let's say I wanted you to make my cheesecake my exact way. Then the way

that I would get you to do that is to give you the recipe. There would be a couple of parts to that recipe. The

first thing is I would have a name for that recipe. Lisa's delicious strawberry cheesecake. I would have a description

of when you should choose that recipe as opposed to all of the other recipes that you might have. make this, use this

recipe when you want to make a cheesecake using fresh strawberries and yogurt or whatever that looks like. And

then I would have stepby-step instructions of all of the things you had to do. And then you could follow

those instructions and replicate this exact same thing. So skills for an agent are like recipes for a cook. The other

way to think about this is it's like a handbook or a policy, standard operating policy. If you have a new employee and

you say this is the way we do these things, use this policy when you need to follow these steps and this is how we

want it done. So the idea of using these for your agent is incredibly valuable and I hope you can start to see this

because rather than going in every time and writing this out over and over again or just giving it a general prompt and

asking it to figure it out from its general knowledge. If you have a way that you want something done repeatedly,

consistently, especially if there's quite a lot to it, then the skill is how you write that standard operating

procedure or that recipe for your agent, package it up, and use it. Now, the other thing that is awesome about this

is that this is not co-pilot specific. This is something that is a format that uses is used by all of the different

agents. So, if you're using chat, GPT or Claude, you can use this as well. And what I'm showing you here, I'm showing

you in the context of Copilot and across multiple C-pilot experiences. You can use the same thing in those other tools.

Or if you've got these skills going on in those other tools, you can bring them into Copilot. So let's take a look at a

specific example here, which is something that I'm doing for a client project health check. So let's say I

work with a list of client projects that come out of Excel. that comes out in some kind of raw format like this,

right? I've got a list of my clients, the project names, the budget, the owner, and this comes out in a raw

format, which is kind of messy. So, we've got a rate card here of what we charge. And what I want to do is go

through the same process every time. This comes out of my project system, or maybe people have just typed this mess

into a spreadsheet together. This is what happens. and I have a set of instructions that I want to go through

every time. So, the first thing I want to do is make sure that all of the currency and numbers are corrected. So,

I'm basically giving my agent a set of instructions that says, "Copy that data into a new spreadsheet.

Turn this into a worksheet. Change the formatting to this. Change the formatting to that." And so on and so on

through a bunch of things, including adding some extra columns to review it in the specific way that I want. Now,

this is an example where we're working with Excel, but it doesn't need to be Excel. It can be something that's as

simple as formatting text in a certain way or producing like doing a review of something in a certain way. So, anything

you can think of that you have a process that is repeatable where you can describe the steps and you want them

consistently done that way is a candidate for a skill. Now, the actual skill file itself, this is where if

you're a non-technical person, what will happen is any content you look at about skills will start talking about markdown

files. skills.mmd. And if you are a business user and not a technical person, you're probably going, "What's a

markdown file? I can't do markdown files. That sounds too much like code. It's actually just a text file with some

formatting so signals and signs in there." It's actually really easy. You'll see I'm looking at my file here

just in Notepad, which we've all got. So, this is something where the makeup of this skill markdown file is as simple

as this. Remember with the recipe, right? We have a name. You have a name for what this thing is called, which is

just like the title or the name of anything. Note that you want it all in lowerase with little hyphens. You don't

want spaces in there. So, you just have to kind of have it as a single string of text without spaces. That's as technical

as I'm getting on you now. Description, just in natural language. When should the agent use this? How does it know

this? Because the idea is that you will have dozens if not hundreds of these skills. And this also helps especially

if you're using parts of the platform where you have to pay consumption costs. Something like co-work. These skills can

just be sitting there in the background not consuming any tokens. It's just like the library, your recipe book, the

library, the standard operating procedure library just sitting there waiting. And this description and the

name help the agent know, oh, that's what I need to do. So when you run something like this, it's scanning just

that list of titles and descriptions to figure out what it should use and then it runs it. So this is a really key

thing. Even if you're not using something like co-work, it's going to help you with consistency and speed. But

if you are using something where you're paying for tokens, you're not now paying for the consumption cost of the agent to

figure out what to do. you're paying a much smaller cost for it to pick the right skill and then just follow the

instructions. So, this is actually a really good way of making a more efficient way of doing those kinds of

things that use consumption so you don't use as many tokens and as many as many credits. So, we've got the name, we've

got the description. When I ask for this, this is when I want you to use it. The formatting, the markdown thing is

basically just these things at the top here where we've got this formatting of name in lowerase colon, description in

lowerase colon, some little dashes there that mark the beginning and end of the section, and then this hashtag which

just indicates like it's a level one heading, client project health, and you'll see this is just all natural

language and level two heading. Now, I'm showing you the sort of inside of what this looks like so you understand what

we're doing here. The good news is that Copilot has a skill to create skills. So, you can actually ask Copilot to

create a skill for you. We'll come back to that cuz I want to show you how to use it first and then how to create your

own skill. And uh we might do some more videos on this. Let me know if this is useful. I think this is one of these

things that's such an important thing and is a little inaccessible to business users if we don't break it down in this

way cuz it is not technical at all. This is all just clever use of language and delegation. So the first thing I'm going

to show you is using this skill in Excel and then we're going to have a look at using it in an agent. But the same

concept applies. I'm using Excel as an example because it's a nice procedural thing. But the same concept applies no

matter what it is. So in Excel, if you come into here with Copilot open in Excel and click on this plus button,

you'll see this option for choose plugin and skills. Now, I've done this before. If you haven't used skills before, what

you do is go into settings and manage skills. The first time you do this, it might be a little bit grayed out. Just

breathe and give it a few seconds and it'll it'll pop up. Don't panic. And then the first time you do this, you'll

find that that is switched off. You click through into there and it will give you instructions. It will say set

up a one drive folder. So once you've set up that one drive folder that sits not surprisingly in your one drive under

copilot Microsoft Excel skills. So each of the apps that you use these skills exist in different places. This is the

folder of skills that Microsoft Excel can access. We've got a separate folder. You'll go through the same process in

PowerPoint. If you're building something in the agent builder, you're going to put the skills directly in there. In

co-work, you're going to put it directly in there. So even though it's the same thing, we are putting it in the right

place so that the relevant parts of co-pilot know where it is. But once you've made a skill, you can use it in

multiple different places or as I said even in other non-Copilot AI tools. This is not at all unique to Copilot. This is

a standard thing. So what the structure of the skill is is a folder that has a name and this skill.md file. So, I'm

going to go in here and show you my skill.md file. So, this is sitting inside my downloads folder. This is the

skill.md file that I was just showing you. We'll just close that out so that we don't get into a problem here. And

what I've done is I've turned it into a zip file that has the same name. So, if you're not familiar with how to do that,

once you've got this text file, you're going to rightclick, compress to zip file, and it just creates that zip file.

So that's all I've done there. We're going to come back to that because sometimes you need to have a zip file

and sometimes you just need to have a folder. So I'm going to show you the folder first, but just that's where it's

coming from. So if you're working with skills in Excel, once you go through to this one drive folder, you click create

or upload, you create a folder and the folder needs to be the name of the skill. So this skill is called client

project health check. Now you'll notice that I'm using lowercase hyphens all the same

thing, right? Don't don't get fancy with how you name this, right? The name of the folder is the name of the skill and

that's how it knows. This is not this is not a time for hierarchies or other names. This is very simple. Inside the

folder, we are going to upload from here this skill.md file. So, I'm just going to drag it across and load it

into there. Now, this seems a little bit strange to start with. The file itself, the skill itself is always just called

skill.md. It don't give it its own name. It's always called skill.md, but it sits in a

folder and the folder name is where the agent is going to look for that skill. And then inside the skill.md it had the

remember it had the name in there. So you just don't call that actual markdown file that text file. You just don't give

that a different name. It's a little bit weird. So the name of the folder and then the name is inside the text file.

The reason for that, this is too advanced for this tutorial, but the reason for that is that a skill can have

more than just that file. So that skill.md is sort of the instructions, the recipe, but you can have templates

and references and other things in that folder. That's a more advanced tutorial for another time, but there is a reason

it's a folder structure and not just that single file. All right. So now we have got that inside our Excel skills.

If I come back now into my Excel spreadsheet, click refresh, then any skills that I've uploaded will appear in

this list. There we go. Now, for Excel, what we need to do is just a single folder with the name and that file in

there, not the zip folder for Excel. If it doesn't appear, you might have used the zip folder because you need that in

some places, but not here. We need to say yes, I want to allow Excel to use custom skills. And I'm going to toggle

that one on. come back in here and then what I can do is just atmention that skill. So this is

like calling that in and remember it was called client project health check and off we go and that goes ahead and just

runs that skill. Now while it's doing that let me show you how I made that skill. I actually used co-work to make

it but you can use co-pilot to make it as well. So then what I'm going to do is come into copilot and just ask it to

create a skill. So I'm using create a skill.md. So I'm asking it to create that file. And what I've got here is

quite a long description of my spreadsheet and what I want in that file. Now this is going to depend on

what your particular process is and how it looks. You can either create a skill by just opening a text document and

typing it in the required format. If you're a beginner though, asking Copilot to create a skill for you is an easy way

to do it. I'm also going to show you if you're using the agent builder, how you can create a skill inside the agent

builder, too. But the idea here is that this is just a simple text format. I would suggest if you're starting with

this, you can even do something quite basic like create a skill that will review the language that I'm using and

write it in a more human way without using the AI type words. So you can actually even have a skill that just

rewords something. Create a skill that will check my press release and make sure that our brand is used in a certain

way and make sure that it's structured in a certain way and uses these language conventions or whatever it is for you.

So just have a think about any of those repeatable processes that you've got. If you've created a skill or if you've got

an idea for a skill, please add it into the comments. And if you're watching the video, have a look in the comments for

ideas from others because all of this stuff is is, you know, is very is very kind of community sharing. Have a look

online as well. There's plenty of skills out there on GitHub for other platforms, including Chat GPT and Claude. You can

always use those there. Just be very careful about downloading skills and copying them. Make sure they're from a

reputable source and they don't have things in them that might cause disruption for you. But mostly, if

you're using a reputable source, you should be fine. So, I'm going to let that skill go away and make itself.

Let's check back in on our spreadsheet here. All right. So, this has actually done a whole lot of things. So, while I

was off teaching you how to make a skill, it's reasoned in 13 steps and it's completed the health check. So, now

what we've got is this new tab here. It has gone through and tidied up the formatting. So you'll notice in the raw

export that my budget and start dates and statuses were a little bit all over the place. So one of the things that

skill does is make sure that all of those things are consistent, which they are. It's very pleasing. And then it's

also added in here. It's looked up from the rate card, brought those rates across and done all of these

calculations and created all of these formulas. So the idea here is that every time I get that data export, instead of

saying to someone, can you go through and do this clean up? Or instead of me sitting here and cleaning it up, if this

is how I want it to look every time, I just use this skill and I get this completed outcome. So this works really

well if I want to work with this in Excel. If every time I download my spreadsheet, it sits here and I want to

use it here. But you can use this same skill in other parts of your work. So you might have this as part of a process

somewhere else. And I want to tap into this skill in multiple places. So one of the places you can do that is inside the

agent builder. So the agent builder, if you're not familiar with it, is a place where you can narrow down your co-pilot

experience for a very specific task. The way that you get to that on the main menu over here is to choose new agent.

And it comes up here. And what I'm going to do here is say create an agent that can review and report on our on the

status of our projects. Okay. Now, this is not a very good prompt because I should be giving it a

lot more about how I want it to do that, but I'm actually deliberately creating something kind of shallow here in order

to help you understand what's going on with skills. So, I'm going to get it to just draft instructions for me. So

something generic. The instructions describe the overall behavior of the agent. So here is an agent that is going

to understand what's going on with our projects. Perhaps I can give it a project and it can review it. Now

depending on how you write instructions. See here that it was looking it was thinking about whether it needed a

skill. So this project agent could be one that can do lots of different things. It could be able to ask for. So,

what it's doing here, ask for a name and uh check things. All right. So, we've actually got we've actually got

something going on here. It's created a skill for me. So, based off my very brief prompt there, it's decided that

it's got a project status review skill. It can review files, meetings, teams, conversations. So, this is an example of

depending on how you write your instructions for your agent, it will it will come through here. Let's take a

look at what it's actually done. So this is use it whenever a user asks to review a project's current position delivery

health. So this is very similar to what we were doing, but this one is actually going to kind of look across SharePoint

across documents. So this is something perhaps where we've got a particular project and what it's going to be able

to do is go check my teams meetings, check my emails, check my SharePoint, check all of those things and it will it

will run that. But I might want to use the other one as well. So this is now something that can review a particular

project. But I want to come in here and say I want to add another skill that is about reviewing the list of projects. So

we've got two things going on here. What I can do here is say add a skill. So if you've already got one, this is where

you need the zip file. So depending on remember when we added it to Excel we just uploaded created a plain folder and

put the skill in there. Earlier we created compressed it into a zip file. That's the one that I'm going to move

into here now and click upload. What I'm going to do is give it some instructions so it understands when to use this other

skill. So, I'm going to say when the user uploads an Excel spreadsheet

and asks for a health check, use the skill client project health check. Now, that

will edit the instructions in my agent so that it understands it's got those two skills in there. So, now we've got

two repeatable skills. And I've shown you a couple of different ways of creating it. The first one was the one

we did earlier. That's the prompt I ran earlier where it's created the skill.md. I can download that and you can do all

of the things that we've just been talking about. I have created one by just describing what I wanted in agent

builder and it's figured out I need a skill for something. To be honest, if you do it that way, you need to be very

specific about your instructions. And I've shown you how to upload one in here. You can also create with chat in

here. So if you find yourself in the agent builder, rather than doing what I just did over in the main chat, I can

actually come in here and just create it with chat and it will package it up and add it all in there as well. So that's

another easier way to do that. What I'm going to do just for the purposes of demo here is that I'm going to delete

that other one because I haven't really thought that one through. You'll see it just created it and it was a little bit

random. And I want to show you that this same skill works in here and I want to guarantee that it's going to only call

that skill. So you'll see that we have got something in here now that says when the user uploads a spreadsheet and

asks for a health check, run that one. So what we're going to do here is create this agent so that it's ready to use.

Start the chat with it. and I'm going to upload my client projects file and say run a client

health check. Now, you'll know it doesn't sort of explicitly come up on the screen with

the actual skill, but you'll be able to watch as you go through this that it will call that skill and it will figure

out how to do it. So, you'll see some sort of note in there that says, I'm going to call that skill and we're going

to we're going to work on that. So you'll see as it runs that you'll start to get these types of messages. It seems

like the task requires the Excel spreadsheet skill because actually it's going to create a new spreadsheet. If

you expand this, it actually starts to look at what it's doing and you'll see eventually that it will pick up on that

skill that it needs to do. Now again, if you're not a technical person, don't worry about all this coding and

executing and bash and whatever this is. That's the agent doing its work for you. so that you don't have to understand

that stuff. While it's doing that, I also want to show you that this is something that you can add into co-work.

So, in my co-work here, this is the consumptionbased pricing. This is an add-on to the main co-pilot. I can click

plus customize and I can add skills in here as well, add a skill or upload a skill. So that

idea of creating it in there and I can do the same thing. I can upload that zip file into here and now that client

project health check is also available in co-work. So co-work is for much more complex delegating tasks. But let's say

that I had a set of complex tasks where I wanted to say download this from here and review this and run that thing and

then turn that into emails and send it out. That skill now becomes one of the things that it can do. And remember,

because this one is costing co-pilot credits, it's going to be cheaper in terms of credits to run that skill step

by step instead of asking co-work to figure that out every time. Let's go back and have a look over here and see

how we're going. You'll see it's doing the things. So, that skill that I gave it definitely had

an XLOOKUP formula and a rate card. So, it's doing all of those things and running that and creating this new sort

of health check piece in there. And then when it's finished, it has completed the health check. We can open that inside

Excel. There's the new tab there for health check. And you'll notice that it has pulled in

the charge rate, the value, the budget used, uh the flag. Now, you'll see it's not quite as good as when I did this in

Excel. So, we've got the flag with the watch at risk budget, and the chart isn't quite as pretty as what I got when

I did here. Copilot in Excel has more skills for working with Excel than what we just did here, but it's the same

skill and it's the same concept. And depending on how you wanted that to run, you could certainly adjust that. The

advantage of running it inside the agent though is that it's now not just Excel in isolation. It's actually running it

inside this agent which has context of other things that are going on. So it's also giving me these headline findings.

So I'm using that skill inside an agent that can do other things as well versus using it in Excel or versus using it in

co-working process. Now skills also exist in PowerPoint and as you can imagine skills

in PowerPoint do different kinds of things. So, if we come in here, we've actually got a bunch of preset skills.

So, when this comes up, we've got skills that are built by Microsoft ready to use in PowerPoint. Visualize the slide.

Create an interactive slide is a good one. I explain this presentation. I'm going to do whole other videos here on

skills in PowerPoint and skills in Excel. We skipped over the standard skills, but there are also standard

skills in Excel that can do financial types of things and visualizing data. So, there's a lot going on here that you

can use to benefit from. Stay subscribed and I'll have a whole playlist here on all of the different things you can do

with skills. But I hope that helps you understand that this is not a technical concept and it is definitely something

that you can do even as a non-technical person and it will really uplift what you can get out of your co-pilot or any

other AI experience. Thanks for watching.