Skills in Microsoft Copilot

How Microsoft 365 Copilot's equivalent of skills works — and how to rebuild a Skillagram skill into it.

The short version

Microsoft 365 Copilot doesn't read the open SKILL.md format, and it has no portable "skill" file you import. What it has is Agent Builder, where you create declarative agents — reusable assistants that capture how your firm does a task: instructions, knowledge sources, and actions, all inside the same Copilot you already use in Word, Outlook, and Excel. You share them within your Microsoft 365 organization; you don't move them between firms or other tools as files.

So on Skillagram, a Copilot skill is shared as instructions you rebuild in Agent Builder, not a file you drop in.

What Copilot calls a "skill"

The agent lives inside Copilot and draws on your work context: SharePoint documents, Outlook email, Teams chats. Grounding on your work data does require a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, though (see below).

Rebuilding a skill in Copilot (the realistic "import")

When you find a skill on Skillagram you want in Copilot, you recreate it in Agent Builder:

1. In Microsoft 365 Copilot, choose New agent.
2. Describe the agent in plain language and Copilot configures it for you, or switch to the Configure tab and fill the fields by hand — following the skill's instructions from Skillagram.
3. Give it a name and a description, then paste the skill's method into the Instructions field: the steps, the logic, the behavioral rules, examples of the expected output.
4. Add the knowledge sources the skill references: SharePoint files and folders, documents, a clause bank, public web pages.
5. Test it on the Try it tab against a sample document and compare the result with the skill's expected output, then refine the instructions.
6. Share it: use the Share button to choose who can use it — specific people or your whole organization.

Heads-up on permissions: if your admin has restricted sharing, the agent won't become visible until an admin approves and publishes it to the organization catalog (the Built by your org section of the Agent Store). If a colleague says "I can't find the agent you shared," this is almost always why.

The firm angle: Copilot inside Office

The reason many firms look at Copilot isn't the agent itself — it's that it lives inside Word, Outlook, Excel, and Teams: it drafts from a prompt and reference files, summarizes a long judgment, rewrites for tone and clarity, compares clauses, summarizes an email thread. A declarative agent is how you give that generic Copilot your firm's specific method — and that method is exactly what a Skillagram skill carries.

The licensing and admin reality matters. Microsoft 365 Copilot is a paid add-on on top of a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan; without the license an agent can still draw on SharePoint sites and public web pages, but grounding on your work data (Outlook email, Teams chats) requires the Copilot license. License assignment, agent approval, and sharing policies are all governed from the Microsoft 365 admin center — in a structured firm you'll almost always go through your IT admin.

The portability reality

Microsoft is opening its extensions toward MCP and connectors, but that connectivity is about feeding the agent the right documents and context — not about importing or exporting skill definitions across vendors. For now, a Copilot agent stays in Copilot. Skillagram bridges the gap by carrying the method so it can be rebuilt anywhere.

Product features change quickly. If Microsoft 365 Copilot's interface has moved since this was written, check Microsoft Learn documentation or your firm's Microsoft 365 admin for the current steps.