Skills

For everyone

Built-in skills the assistant can follow to produce office files — Word, Excel, PDF, PowerPoint, charts, data analysis, writing and themes — what each one does, and what it honestly cannot.

A skill is procedural knowledge the assistant loads when your request matches it: a written procedure it follows with the app's own capabilities, not a program that runs by itself. Every deployment ships a set of built-in skills, listed below. You can also add your own in the Workspace → Skills tab (a SKILL.md file, optionally zipped with bundled scripts and reference documents), and an administrator manages the built-in ones there too — reviewing, editing or turning any of them off deployment-wide.

The assistant sees only one line per skill at first; when your request matches, it loads the full instructions (load_skill), and any bundled scripts or reference documents it needs (load_skill_file). You can force a skill by naming it in your message with an @: asking for "@word a two-page report" loads the word skill no matter what else the description matching decides.

The office skills

With the document service (the default in the kit, see Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files) the word, excel, powerpoint and pdf skills create and edit files only through the doc_* tools: one rule, stated first in each skill, and no Python for documents. The one exception is a custom deck design you explicitly ask for (see powerpoint). Where the service is not deployed they fall back to Python in your browser (see Python in the browser): the needed packages are already vendored by the deployment, and the files the code writes come back as downloadable artifacts. The fallback instructions sit in a clearly labelled last section of each skill and say they apply only when the tools are absent. The honest limits are listed with each skill.

Skill	What it is for
word	Creating and editing Word documents (document tools)
excel	Workbooks with formulas, formatting and native charts
pdf	Creating PDF documents (document tools)
pdf-tools	Working with existing PDFs: merge, split, forms, encryption
powerpoint	Decks on real layouts, with backgrounds and shapes (document tools)
charts	Publication-minded figures with matplotlib and seaborn
data-analysis	Profiling data and testing hypotheses, with the caveats stated
business-writing	Internal communications in the usual formats
themes	Colour and font themes applied across documents and decks
weather	Current weather, forecasts, rain totals and air quality for any place, from a free service that needs no key (uses web fetch)

Three more built-ins handle data shaping: csv-shaping, json-shaping and report-writing. A last one, cerea, answers "what can you do?", "what is Cerea?" and "how do I use this?": it describes the assistant's capabilities for users and administrators, lists the tools and connectors actually available in the chat, and points to these documentation pages.

word

Reports, letters, meeting notes — built structure-first: real heading styles, tables, lists, and consistent typography. Verified by reading the document back (headings, tables, cell values), not by rendering pages: there is no document renderer in the browser, so exact spacing and pagination deserve a look from you when layout matters. With the document service it also edits a Word file you supply, as tracked changes if you ask; comments, footnote text, content controls and fields are not available.

excel

Workbooks, analysis, charts. With the document service it also edits a workbook you supply (cells, formulas, new sheets, pictures); inserting or deleting rows and adding charts to an existing workbook are not available. Formulas are written as real formulas — but they are not recalculated here: the file stores the formula, and its value appears when the file is opened in a spreadsheet application. Anything the assistant reports as a number in the chat was computed in Python from your data, not read from a formula cell. Native charts (bar, column, stacked, line, area, pie, doughnut, scatter) live inside the workbook.

pdf

Reports and documents built from the same spec as a Word file — flowing layouts for prose, tables with repeating headers, images, charts (always images in a PDF), a table of contents with page numbers. Verified by reopening the file and counting its pages. Latin, Greek and Cyrillic text render with embedded fonts; other scripts do not, and the assistant says so. Where the document service is absent the skill falls back to reportlab in the browser, whose standard fonts cover ASCII only.

pdf-tools

The other half of PDF work, on an existing file: fill in a form, merge, split, rotate, reorder pages, extract text and metadata, encrypt and decrypt. With the document service a form is filled by doc_outline and doc_edit (see Filling PDF forms), one rule stated first in the skill; the browser route for forms is only the fallback when the service is absent. Everything else is done in the browser. Encryption uses RC4-128 because the browser has no AES library for PDF work — the assistant will say so if you ask for it to encrypt.

powerpoint

Decks built by filling real layouts and placeholders — never text boxes overlaid on slides — so the master's branding carries through. With the document service the assistant writes a slide spec: six 16:9 layouts, titles, body blocks, speaker notes, native charts, tables and images. Text is 20 to 24 pt and never below 14 pt (the assistant splits a crowded slide), and content stays below the title. It works with your own .pptx when you attach one and ask for its look; editing an existing deck changes only the slides and text it names. For designed pages a slide can have a background (a colour, a two-colour gradient or a picture cropped to fill) and up to 30 shapes (rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, line, arrow, chevron, text box). A shape without text may run off an edge if at least 0.5 cm shows; text always stays on the slide. The result warns about overflow, overlap and low contrast.

The tools are the default. The one exception: when you explicitly ask for a custom design the tools cannot express (an infographic, a timeline drawn from shapes, a "designed" deck), the assistant builds it in the browser sandbox and says so in one line. When it is unclear which you want ("make it look great"), it asks, with two choices: a clean deck in standard layouts, or a custom design. A deck is never made both ways. Adding native charts to an existing deck and editing chart data are not available.

Without the service the skill falls back to the bundled outline generator: it ships a demonstration template, picks visual types from a markdown outline and validates structurally (empty placeholders, estimated overflow, off-slide shapes). Either way the visual verdict is yours to make when you open the deck.

charts

Figures that keep the data honest: zero-baseline bars, labelled axes, uncertainty shown and named, colour-blind-safe palettes, raw points visible. Output is static — PNG or SVG files (or the automatic figures under a code block). There is no interactive charting and no Plotly in the sandbox.

data-analysis

Profiling an unfamiliar dataset, then hypothesis testing with the discipline shown: the test chosen for the design, assumptions checked and reported, effect sizes computed alongside p-values, power analysis when asked. Built on pandas, scipy and statsmodels. It will not make causal claims from observational data, and Bayesian methods are out of reach in the sandbox.

business-writing

3P updates, company newsletters, FAQ answers, status and leadership updates, incident reports — each with a bundled format guide the assistant follows. Every claim in the document traces to your chat or a computed result; nothing is invented.

themes

Ten curated colour-and-font themes (Arctic Frost to Tech Innovation) applied consistently across a Word document, a deck, a chart or an HTML artifact — plus a custom theme built from your description. Font names are carried in the file and substituted by the viewer's system; no font files are embedded.

Managing skills

• For you: the Workspace → Skills tab lists your own skills with an on/off switch; import a multi-file skill as a zip of its folder.
• For administrators: the same tab shows the deployment's built-in skills. A built-in can be edited in place — the deployment's updates never overwrite an edited skill — or disabled. An operator can switch a skill off for the whole deployment with CHAT_SKILLS_DISABLED (a comma-separated list of names) in the environment.
• Skills are instructions, never code the server runs: everything executes in your own browser's sandbox, under the same rules as every other code block.