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How to use claude skills

How to Use Claude Skills: Start With the 4 Built-In Ones Before You Install Anything (2026)

How to Use Claude Skills: Start With the 4 Built-In Ones Before You Install Anything (2026)

I had 60. That's the worst part. I would create them too granular. Sixty Claude skills. My main skills folder is down to 26 as of September 25, 2026, and I probably gotta delete a few. So if you went into Settings looking for a Skills button and it wasn't there, you're ahead of where I was. A commenter on one of my TikToks asked it word for word: "But where in settings". Or you found it, turned something on, and now you can't tell if it did anything. Both are two switches and one test away from fixed. And you don't need to install a single skill to start, because four of them already ship with Claude.The Skills menu inside my Claude composer, September 18, 2026. That menu is where you end up. Here is how to get there on your account. What you need (as of September 25, 2026)Any Claude plan. Anthropic's Use skills in Claude page lists Free, Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise. Code execution switched on. Skills hide without it. That's step one below. Claude on the web or the desktop app. The switches are in the same place on both. On a work account: skills can run code and reach other services. Before you upload one from outside, ask IT what's allowed. On Enterprise, an owner turns skills on for everyone. Skip for now: skill packs, "500 free skills" downloads, and building your own. You'll get there.Anthropic's skills help page, captured September 25, 2026. Turn on code execution first, because Skills stays hidden without it Settings > Capabilities > Code execution and file creation, switch it on. That one toggle is the gate. Anthropic's troubleshooting list puts it first for both "I can't see Skills" and "my skill is greyed out". On a work plan, the path is different:Team: skills are on by default at the organization level, so you usually go straight to step two. Enterprise: an owner has to enable both code execution and Skills in Organization settings > Plugins & skills, on the Policy tab. If it's off, that's IT's switch, not yours.Two things that look like bugs and aren't. Since the September 16 update folded Cowork into every chat, your old Cowork skills carried over. If your message box still shows "Chat" and "Cowork" as two options, your account just hasn't moved to the new layout yet. And incognito chats can't create files or run code, so don't expect a file skill to fire there. That last part is my read of Anthropic's merge notes, not a line they wrote. Find your skills in Customize > Skills, not in Settings Left sidebar > Customize > Skills. This is where people get stuck. Since February, Anthropic groups skills, plugins and connectors under Customize, and that's where the list and the on/off toggles live now. You'll see your skills in sections: Personal, Shared with you, and Organization on a work plan. The four built-ins are already in there. You can also reach them mid-chat: the + button in the message box has a Skills submenu. That's the menu in the screenshot at the top of this page. Ask for a real file and let the 4 built-ins fire on their own Anthropic's help page lists four built-in skills: Excel, Word, PowerPoint and PDF. With code execution on, you don't call them by name. Ask for the file, and Claude picks the skill. Give it 15 minutes with something from your actual week. Paste your notes from the last meeting and send this: Turn these meeting notes into a 5-slide PowerPoint deck for my team. One slide per decision, a last slide with owners and due dates. Keep every slide under 30 words.You should get a .pptx file back, not a wall of text in the chat. Swap the ask and the same thing happens with a spreadsheet ("turn this list into an Excel tracker with a status column"), a Word doc or a PDF. If Claude answers in chat instead of handing you a file, name the skill once: "Use the PowerPoint skill for this." That's the override, not the normal way.Anthropic's enable steps and the four built-ins, September 25, 2026. Applicable for: ops leads, HR, project managers, teachers, anyone who turns notes into decks and trackers. Check it fired by asking Claude straight out A skill that didn't load looks like a normal answer. That's the trap. Here is how I tell. First, the output quality. You know what good looks like for your own work, and a skipped skill gives you the generic version. In Claude Code it literally says it's using the skill when it gets invoked. In the Claude app, Anthropic's advice is to review Claude's thinking and look for the skill loading. Second, I just ask. If I see the output, I'm like damn it looks bad. Did you use the skill? And it'll tell you why it didn't. Did you use my [skill name] skill for this? If not, why not, and what should I change so you use it next time?Usually the fix it points to is the skill's description. Carrie Loranger, who teaches creators this in her Claude Skills guide, puts it bluntly: "If you do not see a confirmation that the skill loaded, the skill is not running and you are getting a generic Claude response. This is the single most common mistake new users make." When it doesn't fire, the fix is usually one of these:What you seeWhat's going onFixNo Skills section anywhereCode execution is off, or an Enterprise owner hasn't enabled skillsStep one above, or ask your admin A shared skill is greyed outShares arrive switched offToggle it on in Customize > Skills after you read it Skill is on, Claude ignores itThe description doesn't match how you askName it once in the prompt, then rewrite the description in your words Upload failsZIP too big, folder name doesn't match the skill name, or no skill.md insideRename the folder to match, check skill.md is there, zip again You can't edit a directory skillDirectory skills are view-onlyDownload a copy, edit it, upload it as your ownInstall one skill on purpose, and read it before you switch it on Once the built-ins work, you can add more. There are three ways a skill reaches you:The directory. Customize > Skills > + > Browse skills, then Install. These arrive switched on and view-only. A ZIP file. Customize > Skills > + > Create skill > Upload a skill. A skill is just a folder with a skill.md inside, zipped. A teammate's share on Team or Enterprise. It shows up under Shared with you, greyed out until you enable it, and it updates when they update it.Anthropic's own line: only install skills from trusted sources, and review a colleague's skill before you enable it. My take on the rest. As a beginner, you shouldn't be looking for skills. You're asking the wrong questions. "What are the best skills to install?" means you don't know your own workflow yet. If it was that easy, you'd plug a chip into your AI and it would write your posts for you. And no one's gonna give away a really high quality skill for free. They'll give you a starting point. A lot of people on GitHub have released decent ones. We took a framework Andrej Karpathy shared (his LLM wiki pattern) and molded it to our own, instead of installing it whole, because some of it wasn't relevant to us. I rarely download skills to be honest. The latest one that was actually worth it was Tesseract's video and motion skills, for motion graphics in my long-form and Shorts. I'd already tried building my own skill for that job, and it was decent. We're keeping the brain of mine and replacing the motion tool it ran on. Keep the list short, and build your own only after you've done it by hand Here's where my 60 came from. I'll create a skill for YouTube descriptions. I'll create a skill for YouTube headline. I'll create a skill for a thumbnail. Now I just have one skill for long form and it has all that embedded in it. That's why understanding the architecture of a skill matters. A skill is a folder. The skill.md is like the table of contents: the main instructions, pointing to other files in that folder (scripts, reference notes). That's how one skill handles a complex job instead of ten tiny ones fighting each other. My rule is still the same one: do the thing by hand two or three times first. You're gonna have to do the process manually and test it and refine it once or twice and then you're gonna build the skill. Otherwise, you're gonna build something and you're at risk that you're never gonna use it again. When you get there, don't write it from scratch. Anthropic has a skill builder, skill-creator, in the example skills. Use that and call it a day. What made the architecture click for me was Anthropic's free Introduction to agent skills course. It's six modules taught in Claude Code, and the folder layout is the same one the app uses. If you're on Pro, Max or Team and use Claude on a Mac, there's also Record a skill in the + menu: you do the task once on screen and Claude drafts the skill from the recording.A Record a skill proposal on my Mac, from a September 2026 test run. Where to go from here depends on your plan. On Free, Pro or Max, stay on the built-ins until you've asked for a few real files. On Team or Enterprise, check your Skills list before you install anything, because owners can provision skills for everyone. The full case for when a skill is worth building, and when it's the wrong tool, is in Claude Skills for non coders. For the rest of the Claude setup around it, start at Claude Guides. Cleanup matters too, and I'm not preaching from a clean list: my Claude app still has an n8n skill switched on from January. Customize > Skills is where you switch one off or delete it. When I clean up, I don't just delete. I fold the tiny ones together, because a single skill with the proper architecture can not only fit more and be more complex but be better quality. That's how 60 became 26. You get to skip the 60. Ask Claude for one real file this week, watch a built-in fire, and build your first skill only after you've done that job by hand. Common questions Are Claude Skills free? Yes. Anthropic lists Skills on Free, Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise as of September 2026, as long as code execution and file creation is on. Older pages, including a Short I made in July, say you need a paid plan, but the current help center says otherwise. For what else the $0 plan covers, see Claude's free plan. Why can't I find Skills in my Claude settings? Because it moved. Turn on Code execution and file creation in Settings > Capabilities, then open Customize in the left sidebar and click Skills. On Enterprise, an owner has to enable skills first under Organization settings > Plugins & skills. Do I have to call a Claude skill by name? No. The Excel, Word, PowerPoint and PDF skills fire on their own when your request needs a file. Naming a skill is the override for when Claude skipped it. Where did my Cowork skills go after the September update? They carried over into the merged Claude, per Anthropic's September 16, 2026 release notes. If you still see Chat and Cowork as separate options, your account hasn't moved yet. The full map of what moved is in Claude Cowork is now Claude, and the new workflow is in how to use Claude Cowork. Do skills I turn on in the Claude app show up in Claude Code? Yes, one way. Anthropic says app skills sync into Claude Code from version 2.1.273. If Claude Code is next for you, start with how to use Claude Code. Where this comes from The click paths, plans and built-ins come from Anthropic's help center and release notes, checked September 25, 2026. The 60-to-26 story and the "did you use the skill?" check are mine. I haven't tested every skill in the directory, and most of mine run in Claude Code, not the app. Published September 25, 2026. Last reviewed September 25, 2026 against Anthropic's help center.This post is part of Claude Guides, the hub with every plan decision, task comparison, and setup guide for using Claude without code.