If you’re using Microsoft 365 Copilot inside SharePoint, there’s a good chance you’ve hit the same wall most organizations do: Copilot is smart, but every conversation starts from zero. You explain the task, you explain the context, you explain the format you want the output in every single time.
That’s exactly the problem SharePoint Skills solves.
What is a “Skill,” exactly?
Think of a Skill as a pre-packaged set of instructions that gives Copilot in SharePoint a specific, repeatable job it already knows how to do, the way a new hire follows a well-written SOP instead of guessing. Install it once, and from then on you simply ask for the task by name (or describe it), and Copilot runs it the same reliable way every time.
Skills are built by the Microsoft 365 and Power Platform community, pnp.github.io/sharepoint-skills currently hosts a catalog of 50 free, open-source Skills, covering everything from document management and reporting to site governance and proposal automation.
Why this matters for your organization
- Consistency. The same request produces the same quality of output every time, no depending on how well someone phrased their prompt.
- No code required. Skills are installed as folders in SharePoint’s Agent Assets, not deployed by IT. Business users with edit permission can add one directly.
- Focused, not generic. Instead of a general-purpose assistant, you get a specialist for one job, auditing broken links, checking permissions, classifying files, building an executive dashboard.
- Built-in guardrails. Many Skills are explicitly read-only or advisory by design, meaning they report findings rather than making changes on their own.
- Free and transparent. The whole catalog is open source (MIT licensed), so you, or your IT team, can inspect exactly what a Skill does before installing it.
- In the flow of work. No separate tool or tab. You invoke Skills right inside a Copilot conversation on your SharePoint site.
A few examples from the catalog
To make this concrete, here’s a sample of what’s already available:
- Broken Link Auditor — scans pages and news posts for broken or risky links and produces a self-contained HTML health report.
- Permission Report — reviews sharing and access across a site and flags high-risk situations like “Anyone” links or broad group access.
- Metadata Completeness Auditor — checks a document library against its required columns and flags missing or placeholder values.
- Exec Report — turns a SharePoint list, CSV export, or even a verbal description into a polished executive dashboard.
- RFP Response suite — a whole family of Skills that extract requirements from an RFP, find matching content in your libraries, draft sections, and run compliance and tone reviews before a human ever opens the draft.
- List Styling Engine — restyles SharePoint lists and libraries into fully art-directed views, no formatting expertise needed.
That’s a small slice of the 50 available and new ones are added regularly by contributors across the community.
How to install and use a Skill
Getting started takes minutes, not a deployment cycle:
- Check the prerequisites an active Microsoft Copilot license, a SharePoint site with Copilot enabled, and edit permission (to install) or view permission (to simply run an installed Skill).
- Download and extract the Skill’s ZIP file from the catalog.
- Upload the folder into Agent Assets, inside the auto-created Skills folder on your site.
- Start a fresh Copilot conversation and give it a few minutes for discovery.
- Invoke the Skill either by name, or by simply describing the task. Look for the Skill indicator in the chat to confirm it activated.
That’s it. No developer, no custom deployment pipeline.
A word on safe use
Because Skills can touch real content and, in some cases, real permissions, a bit of discipline goes a long way:
- Always review generated output before acting on it, especially for anything that changes content.
- For Skills that modify SharePoint (rather than just reporting on it), confirm scope and get approvals first, and apply least-privilege access.
- Never place credentials or sensitive tenant data inside a Skill’s instructions.
Most of the catalog’s most popular Skills are explicitly built to be read-only or advisory for exactly this reason: they’re designed to inform decisions, not make them for you.
Why I’m sharing this
For organizations already running Microsoft 365 Copilot, SharePoint Skills is one of the fastest, lowest-risk ways to get real, measurable value out of it, without waiting on a custom AI project. It turns Copilot from a blank-slate chatbot into a set of specialists your team can call on inside the tools they already use every day.
If you want help identifying which Skills would move the needle for your team, or building a custom one specific to your processes, I’m happy to talk it through.
👉 Explore the full catalog here: pnp.github.io/sharepoint-skills
What’s the first repetitive SharePoint task you’d hand off to a Skill? I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments.
