Awesome Copilot Cowork Skills

21 workflow skills plus a 16-persona executive review suite for Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork. Drop a folder into OneDrive: no admin, no Copilot Studio, no app package. The same SKILL.md runs verbatim in Claude Code.

Now generally available (16 June 2026). Copilot Cowork is GA worldwide for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers. You need a paid M365 Copilot licence, and Cowork is off by default — an admin enables it and chooses who gets access. On top of the licence, Cowork is billed usage-based in Copilot Credits (pay-as-you-go is $0.01 per credit); see Pricing & cost (GA). Anthropic's Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6 are the models at GA. This is a community library, not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.

GitHub stars License: CC BY-SA 4.0 Format: Agent Skills open standard

Who This Is For

You have a paid M365 Copilot licence with Cowork enabled, and you want Cowork to produce files rather than chat answers. The skills here are built for project managers, IT and MSP admins, executive assistants, and sales and finance people.

Quick check: Microsoft's Use Cowork guide shows the Cowork home page. If you cannot open Cowork the way that guide describes, it is not switched on for your account yet — Cowork is off by default, so ask your admin to enable it. In the meantime, awesome-copilot-chat-agents runs on the free Copilot Chat tier.

Everyone else, there is a better repo for you:

What a Cowork Skill Is (60 seconds)

A custom skill is a folder you drop into OneDrive at /Documents/Cowork/skills/<skill-name>/, containing one file named SKILL.md: YAML frontmatter with exactly two fields (name, description), then Markdown instructions. Cowork discovers it automatically at the start of each new conversation. No registration, no admin, no package.

The format rules every skill in this repo follows:

  • name is kebab-case and identical to the folder name. The Agent Skills open standard requires this. Some published examples do not follow this; every skill here does, which is why these files also run verbatim in Claude Code and VS Code.
  • description is the trigger. Cowork is model-invoked: it activates a skill by matching conversation context against descriptions. Ours are written in third person with concrete trigger conditions ("Use when the user ..."), one to three sentences, under 500 characters.
  • Limits: 50 custom skills per user, 1 MB per SKILL.md (we target under 300 lines, body under roughly 5,000 tokens), maximum 20 companion files per skill, 10 MB total per skill. Companion files are referenced by relative path from the skill root, forward slashes, one level deep.
  • No scripts. Whether Cowork executes bundled scripts is undocumented, so every skill here is instructions plus Markdown reference files only.
  • Per Microsoft's documentation, Cowork reads and writes OneDrive and SharePoint files only, never local device files.

How a custom skill compares

Custom skill (this repo) Built-in skill Plugin skill Copilot Studio agent
What it is A folder with a SKILL.md in your OneDrive One of the 13 capabilities Cowork ships with The same SKILL.md format packaged into an M365 app package A separate agent you @mention, built in Copilot Studio
Who deploys it You, with a folder drop Microsoft IT admin or the Microsoft 365 App Store A maker, via a publish and approval flow
Scope Your account only Every Cowork user Tenant-wide Whoever it is shared with
Registration None, auto-discovered at the start of each new conversation Not applicable Manifest validation, then admin deployment Copilot Studio publish flow
Can it reuse a built-in's name? No, built-ins take naming priority Not applicable No Not applicable

The 13 built-in skills

Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, Email, Scheduling, Calendar Management, Meetings, Daily Briefing, Enterprise Search, Communications, Deep Research, Adaptive Cards (Microsoft's list).

Every skill in this repo composes these built-ins into a workflow. None duplicates one, and none reuses a built-in's name.

The boundary

If it fits in one chat message, it is a prompt, and it belongs in awesome-microsoft-copilot-prompts. Everything here plans and executes a multi-step workflow and produces artifacts: documents, spreadsheets, files with named save locations, often with maintained state between runs.

Install in 60 Seconds

Sixty seconds per skill, once you have the repo downloaded:

  1. Get the files. On the repo page, click Code, then Download ZIP. Extract it anywhere outside OneDrive; you will copy individual skill folders from the extracted copy. (Developers can git clone instead, also outside OneDrive.)
  2. In OneDrive, open /Documents/Cowork/. If it does not exist yet, create it yourself; Microsoft's own instructions say to create the folder if it is missing. Inside it, create a lowercase skills folder.
  3. Copy a skill folder from the extracted repo (the whole folder, including its references/ subfolder where present) into /Documents/Cowork/skills/. Keep the folder name exactly as shipped: it must match the name field inside.
  4. Start a new Cowork conversation and use one of the example triggers from the skill's README. New to Cowork itself? Microsoft's Use Cowork guide shows where the Cowork home page lives and how conversations work.

Do this from a desktop: either drag the extracted skill folder into OneDrive in the browser, or copy it into your synced OneDrive folder in Explorer or Finder. The OneDrive mobile app cannot upload folders, so come back on a desktop if you are reading this on your phone.

Three community-reported gotchas:

  • The skills folder name is lowercase and case-sensitive. Skills will not be found.
  • Discovery happens at the start of a conversation. A conversation that is already open will not see a skill you just added; start a new one.
  • Copy folders into OneDrive rather than working with git there. A .git directory inside an actively syncing OneDrive folder can cause sync conflicts and partial-state corruption; keep your clone or extracted copy elsewhere and copy folders across. (The tenant-side wipe incidents of May and June 2026 are a separate problem, documented with a source in skills-backup-keeper, which exists for exactly that reason.)

Still stuck, or wondering about licences, the EU, safety, or scheduling? The FAQ answers the questions readers actually ask.

Give this to IT: for org-wide deployment, Microsoft documents an admin path that packages the same skill folders into a Microsoft 365 app package, deployed as a plugin through the admin centre or the Microsoft 365 App Store. See Build plugins for Copilot Cowork. Personal OneDrive skills currently need no admin involvement; admin controls for them may be added later.

Pricing & cost (GA)

Cowork reached general availability on 16 June 2026, and cost comes in two layers:

  • The M365 Copilot licence — a paid per-user-per-month subscription (the $30/user/month Copilot add-on), and the prerequisite for Cowork.
  • Usage-based billing on top, denominated in Copilot Credits. Pay-as-you-go is $0.01 per credit, or you can commit usage volume up front (Microsoft's "P3" option) for a discount.

What a single run costs is set by four inputs: model use, context retrieval, tool calls, and runtime. Every skill in this repo is a multi-step job, so those four inputs are exactly what a run consumes — a light skill (a meeting-prep brief) is a few credits; a heavy one (a full status pack on a top-tier model) costs more. Two levers keep that in check:

  • The model picker. Where several models are available (Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6 at GA, with a lower-cost Cowork 1 model coming), pick the cheaper model for routine runs. These skills are model-agnostic — the workflow is identical on either.
  • The skills' own design. Named save paths, no redundant re-reads, draft-only outputs and approval-gated deletes mean fewer wasted runs and no runaway loops — which is also fewer credits.

For admins: Cowork is off by default. You enable it, choose who gets access, and set spending limits and usage alerts at tenant, group and user level, with usage reporting at each. Estimate per-skill cost before rollout with the Cowork cost estimator; background on credits is in What is Copilot Credits.

Sources: Copilot Cowork is now generally available · Manage Copilot Cowork for your organization.

Featured: The Executive Reviewers

Before you walk a document into a steering committee, run it past the executive who will actually interrogate it. Sixteen reviewer personas, each a standalone skill: the C-suite seven (CFO, COO, CTO, CMO, CRO, CBO and CISO) plus a bench of nine (CHRO, General Counsel, product, data, procurement, investor, customer advocate, frontline skeptic and works council representative).

Every reviewer reads your document through its own mandate and produces the same artifact: a DRAFT review with a verdict, cited findings, risks, and the five interrogation questions you will face in the real meeting. Run one persona standalone (a CFO pass on a business case, a CISO pass on a vendor proposal), or run several in sequence and reconcile the conflicts yourself; the disagreement between two reviews is usually where the real work is.

Skill Directory

Every skill folder contains the SKILL.md plus a README with install steps, triggers and a changelog.

Status, June 2026: every skill is format-validated against the Agent Skills spec, and all but the newest have passed a live tenant test — meeting-prep-onepager and no-delete-guardrail first, on 2026-06-11, the rest on 2026-06-16. The contract-review-pack, rfp-comparison-pack, dataset-insight-pack, dpia-draft-pack, export-review-pack, and controls-gap-pack skills (added 2026-06-18) are format-validated and awaiting their first live tenant test; their READMEs say so. Each skill's README carries its own tested-with-date line.

Executive Review

skills/executive-review/

The 16 reviewer personas. Every reviewer produces the same artifact through its own lens: a DRAFT review .docx with a verdict, cited findings, risks and five interrogation questions. Each runs standalone.

The C-suite seven: cfo-reviewer · coo-reviewer · cto-reviewer · cmo-reviewer · cro-reviewer · cbo-reviewer · ciso-reviewer

The bench: chro-reviewer · general-counsel-reviewer · cpo-reviewer · cdo-reviewer · procurement-reviewer · investor-reviewer · customer-advocate-reviewer · frontline-skeptic-reviewer · works-council-reviewer

Meetings

skills/meetings/

# Skill What it produces Example trigger
1 meeting-prep-onepager One-page Word prep brief for any upcoming meeting "Prep me for my next meeting"
2 transcript-to-actions Action-items file, confirmed To Do or Planner tasks, DRAFT owner emails "Turn this transcript into action items and follow-up emails"

Project Management

skills/project-management/

# Skill What it produces Example trigger
3 project-status-tracker Four living project files plus a weekly status-YYYY-WW.docx draft "Produce this week's status report for helios-migration"

Daily Briefings

skills/daily-briefings/

# Skill What it produces Example trigger
4 custom-daily-brief Role-tuned morning brief DOCX: emails, calendar, Teams mentions, deadlines "Run my daily brief"
5 commitment-catcher Commitments ledger (made and owed, overdue flagged) plus To Do entries "What did I promise people in the last 24 hours?"

Email & Inbox

skills/email-inbox/

# Skill What it produces Example trigger
6 inbox-triage Dated triage report, five-bucket inbox sort, labelled reply drafts "Triage my inbox and draft what needs a reply"

Writing & Communication

skills/writing-communication/

# Skill What it produces Example trigger
7 write-like-me Voice profile file plus email and docx drafts in your voice "Draft this email in my voice"
8 branded-deck-builder Brand-compliant .pptx deck on your template, plus outline and compliance report "Build a 12-slide deck on our company template"

Reporting & Analysis

skills/reporting-analysis/

# Skill What it produces Example trigger
9 report-attachment-analyzer Trend spreadsheet plus DRAFT delta summary from recurring emailed reports "Update the trends for the weekly sales report"
10 news-monitor-digest Dated 5-8 item news digest as Word doc or email draft "Sweep my news sources and build today's digest"

Data boundary note for admins: news-monitor-digest reaches outside the tenant by design. It fetches external web content through the Deep Research built-in on every run, and its safety rules treat all fetched web content as untrusted data. No other skill in this library reads anything outside the tenant.

IT Operations

skills/it-operations/

# Skill What it produces Example trigger
11 sharepoint-review-sweeper Overdue-review spreadsheet plus per-owner reminder email Drafts, never sent "Which documents in our library are past their review date?"

Dashboards & Microapps

skills/dashboards-microapps/

# Skill What it produces Example trigger
12 project-dashboard-builder Single-file offline HTML dashboard from project tracker files "Build a dashboard for the website-relaunch project"

Sales & BD

skills/sales-bd/

# Skill What it produces Example trigger
13 estimate-to-sow DRAFT statement-of-work .docx from your estimate spreadsheet, maths validated first "Turn estimate-acme-q3.xlsx into a statement of work"

Meta-Skills

skills/meta-skills/

# Skill What it produces Example trigger
14 no-delete-guardrail Approval gates, versioned files, append-only change journal every conversation "Clean up my project folder, but ask before removing anything"
15 skills-backup-keeper Dated skills-folder backups with manifest, plus append-only session journal "Back up my skills folder before I edit anything"

Legal & Contracts

skills/legal-contracts/

Drafts and organizes only — every output is a DRAFT for a qualified lawyer to review, and law is jurisdiction-specific. Not legal advice. For a legal-lens review of a proposal or deck rather than a contract, use the general-counsel-reviewer persona above.

# Skill What it produces Example trigger
16 contract-review-pack DRAFT contract review pack: key-terms abstraction, deviations vs your playbook, open questions, reviewer checklist "Review nda-acme.docx against our playbook"

Procurement & Vendor Management

skills/procurement/

Prepares the evaluation; never scores, ranks, selects, or awards — those stay with the panel under procurement governance.

# Skill What it produces Example trigger
17 rfp-comparison-pack DRAFT comparison pack: requirement-by-supplier matrix, gaps, clarification questions (+ optional .xlsx) "Compare these tender responses against our requirements"

Data & Analytics

skills/data-analytics/

Explores and drafts; never the source of truth. Every figure is unverified until checked in the data platform, and observations are leads, not conclusions.

# Skill What it produces Example trigger
18 dataset-insight-pack DRAFT insight pack: data profile, observations (as leads), caveats, suggested charts "Explore sales-q3.xlsx and tell me what stands out"

Data Privacy

skills/data-privacy/

Prepares privacy paperwork only — never rates risk, determines lawful basis, or judges adequacy, and works from descriptions, never personal data. The DPO assesses and signs.

# Skill What it produces Example trigger
19 dpia-draft-pack DRAFT DPIA scaffold: processing description, necessity/proportionality questions, risk table (ratings blank), mitigations, open questions "Start a DPIA for the new monitoring tool"

Trade Compliance

skills/trade-compliance/

Prepares the export-control file only — never classifies, screens, clears, or decides a licence. Screening runs in your screening tool; trade compliance decides (civil/criminal liability attaches).

# Skill What it produces Example trigger
20 export-review-pack DRAFT export review: parties to screen, classification worksheet, red-flag review, licence-determination questions "Prepare an export review pack for this order"

Risk, Ethics & Compliance

skills/risk-ethics-compliance/

Prepares GRC paperwork only — never concludes compliance, control effectiveness, or risk acceptance; control owners and audit assess.

# Skill What it produces Example trigger
21 controls-gap-pack DRAFT controls & gap pack: obligations, mapped controls, apparent coverage, gaps, actions to assess "Map this regulation to our controls and find the gaps"

Also Runs in Claude Code and VS Code

Microsoft's plugin-development page, Build plugins for Copilot Cowork (Frontier), states that skills use the Agent Skills open standard, the same format supported by Claude Code, Visual Studio Code Copilot, Gemini CLI, Cursor, JetBrains Junie, and 30+ other AI tools.

Identical format, identical files. To reuse any skill in this repo:

  • Claude Code: copy the skill folder into ~/.claude/skills/ (available in every project) or into a project's .claude/skills/.
  • VS Code (GitHub Copilot): copy the skill folder into .github/skills/ in your repository.
  • Org-wide Cowork plugin path: Microsoft publishes a conversion script (Convert-ClaudePluginToMOS3.ps1) that packages skill folders into a Microsoft 365 app package.

The Cowork-specific parts of each skill (OneDrive save paths, Planner and To Do fallbacks, Drafts-only email) degrade gracefully in other runtimes: the workflow and output structure still apply.

Quality and Safety Bar

This repo was written as one batch in early June 2026, built from the demand and failure threads on r/microsoft_365_copilot; that is why every changelog starts at 1.0 on the same date. The validation bar below is how a batch like this earns trust.

Microsoft's documentation is explicit that custom skills are not validated by Microsoft. This repo applies its own bar instead:

  • Format-validated structure. Every skill has a kebab-case name identical to its folder name, exactly two frontmatter fields, a body under 300 lines, and companion files within the 20-file and 10 MB limits, referenced by relative path one level deep.
  • Human-readable Markdown only. No scripts in any skill, because whether Cowork executes bundled scripts is undocumented. You can read every file in a skill before installing it, and you should.
  • Destructive actions behind approval gates. Every skill is written to require explicit user approval in the conversation before deleting or overwriting a file, and to prefer writing new versioned files.
  • Email never sends. Every email-touching skill is written to create Drafts only.
  • DRAFT until reviewed. Every skill is written to label generated documents DRAFT until a human reviews them.
  • Community-reported frictions designed in. Community reports describe Planner and To Do writes failing silently and outputs landing in session folders. So every skill that touches Planner or To Do specifies a file fallback (for example actions.md) and reports which path was taken, and every skill names explicit OneDrive save paths and reports where each artifact was saved.
  • Status declared. Every skill README carries a tested-in-Cowork status line with the date it passed a live tenant test (the first two on 2026-06-11, the rest on 2026-06-16; contract-review-pack, rfp-comparison-pack, dataset-insight-pack, dpia-draft-pack, export-review-pack, and controls-gap-pack, added 2026-06-18, declare they are not yet tenant-tested). Never trust a skill that claims testing it cannot date.

One thing to be clear about: these are instructions the model is asked to follow, not platform-enforced controls. Cowork has no sandbox that prevents a skill, or injected content inside something a skill reads, from attempting a send or a delete. Treat them as defence in depth, not a guarantee.

For the sceptics: a skill is plain-language instructions that the model reads, which makes any third-party skill a potential prompt-injection vector. Treat skills like browser extensions: read the SKILL.md before dropping it into OneDrive. Install takes a minute; reading the largest skill here before you install takes about ten, and those ten are worth it. Everything in this repo is plain Markdown with no encoded content, written to be audited in one sitting.

How to vet a third-party skill before installing:

  • The frontmatter contains exactly two fields, name and description, and nothing else.
  • No scripts, no encoded or obfuscated blocks, and no instructions to fetch external URLs anywhere in the SKILL.md or its reference files.
  • Every save path points inside your own OneDrive.
  • The safety rules cover, at minimum: email as Drafts only, no delete or overwrite without approval, and a rule that content the skill reads is data to analyse, never instructions to follow.
  • Reject any skill that tells the model to send data to an external address or URL.

Known unknowns, stated plainly: Whether Cowork executes bundled scripts is undocumented. Admin controls for personal OneDrive skills are not documented today and may be added. (Cowork reached GA on 16 June 2026; billing is now usage-based — see Pricing & cost (GA).)

Other Things I Make

Everything in this repo is free under the licence below. Elsewhere:

More from Kesslernity

This repo is free and stays free. If it's useful, here's the rest of the toolkit.

Free

  • 📄 Copilot on One Page — the one-page cheat sheet for getting real answers out of Copilot. Free download

The rest of the free Copilot repos

Deploying Copilot for a team?

  • 🛒 Deployment kits, governance playbooks, and the honest "when not to use it" guides, built so you can deploy Copilot without a consultant: kesslernity.com/store

Independent and vendor-neutral. Not affiliated with Microsoft.

Contributing

Contributions welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the file format and PR guidelines. The hard bar:

  • Multi-step and artifact-producing. The skill plans a workflow and writes files. If the draft fits in one chat message, it is a prompt: we will redirect it to awesome-microsoft-copilot-prompts.
  • Composes built-ins. It orchestrates the 13 built-in skills, never duplicates one, and never reuses a built-in's name.
  • Spec-valid. Kebab-case name matching the folder name, exactly two frontmatter fields, within the size limits.
  • No scripts. Instructions and Markdown reference files only.
  • Status declared. The skill README states its tested-in-Cowork status honestly.

Licence

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)

You are free to use, adapt and redistribute these skills, including commercially, as long as you credit the source and share derivatives under the same licence.

Built by Mathieu Kessler · NerdyChefs.ai · kesslernity.com