Issue with having Claude generate Microsoft Office files

Background

Claude introduced the mechanism called “skills” that expands Claude’s capabilities significantly. See the following doc for more details:

Agent Skills – Claude Docs

There’s also a repository that contains the source code of the Anthropic’s skills. The README says this:

These example skills are all already available to paid plans in Claude.ai.

anthropics/skills: Public repository for Agent Skills

Especially, I find the skills that generate MS Office files (docx, xlsx, pptx) useful.

Issue

I talked with Claude to create the outline of a presentation. Once it was fixed, Claude asked me to create a PowerPoint file based on the outline. (I used Japanese, and what it said was “この構成でスライドを作成しましょうか？”, meaning “do you want me to create a slide deck based on this outline?”)

I answered “yes, please” (in Japanese). Then after a few seconds, Claude claimed that the task was done, but there was no link to the presentation file or artifact.

Solution

I just needed to be more specific: “Please create a slide deck using the pptx skill” instead of “Yes, please” or “Create a slide deck.”

Other info etc.

How and where the skills work

I’m not 100% sure, but after reading the source and some documents by Anthropic, the MS Office related skills are executed on their servers.

At first, I was wondering where they ran, and thought that there might have been missing dependencies required by python-pptx, which is used by the pptx skill. When googling around, I found the following page:

Python Packages Inventory: 184 Libraries for Data Science & Development | Claude

These libraries are installed in VMs that reside in Anthropic’s infrastructure used for skill executions.

The UI sucks

My Settings page looks like this. As you see, “Your skills” is empty:

“Example skills” shows quite a few skills, but no MS office related ones:

So, I couldn’t be sure that the pptx skill was actually installed/enabled or not.

Conclusion

Claude’s paid plan users can use MS Office related skills by default. They allow us to create MS Office files from Claude. Although they are really useful, sometimes you need to be very specific to use them.