> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://futureinuse.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Test before you spread it: Copilot in SharePoint can now evaluate and improve skills with tests
- URL: https://futureinuse.ai/copilot-sharepoint-skills-avaliacao/
- Published: 2026-10-14T12:21:57.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-19T19:50:35.000Z
- Description: In its September update, Microsoft built into the product a habit that applies to any AI instruction a team shares, measuring whether a change improves the result before passing it around.
- Author: Rafael Cordeiro
- Tags: Playbooks & How-to

On September 2, 2026, the SharePoint Blog on Microsoft Tech Community published its monthly roundup of what's new in Copilot in SharePoint. Two of the updates deal with skills, reusable instructions that capture a format or a way of working.

## Personal skills that travel with you

The first update lets you create a personal skill once and use it across every SharePoint site. Microsoft's example is saving the structure of an executive update and applying it to any project's content, wherever that content lives. Another example is a skill that turns long documents into executive briefings, highlighting the proposal, expected value, decisions needed, risks, open questions and next steps. In the same opening paragraph, the post says these skills can follow the user across SharePoint and OneDrive.

## Getting better with evaluations

The second update is the one that matters to anyone standardizing instructions across a team. According to Microsoft, users can ask Copilot to improve a skill with tests, evaluations and measured changes, instead of rewriting the instructions by hand and hoping for a better result. The company's reasoning is that you get to see whether a change actually improves quality before sharing the skill more broadly.

The post's use case is a Legal Operations team asking Copilot to improve its legal review skill for marketing materials. Copilot suggests tests, evaluation criteria and targeted adjustments. The prompt Microsoft suggests reads "Improve my marketing legal document review skill. Create representative tests, evaluate the current results, and recommend measured changes."

The post does not describe how the score is calculated or who sets the final criteria. The feature requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.

## The habit works outside Microsoft

The cycle Microsoft describes has four parts, the instruction, a set of representative tests, an evaluation of the current result and the measured change. You can reproduce it by hand with whatever AI assistant your team uses.

- **Pick five to ten real cases** the instruction has to handle, including at least one hard one.
- **Write down what counts as a good answer** for each case, before running anything.
- **Run the current version and log the result**, case by case.
- **Change one thing at a time** and rerun the same cases, keeping whichever version performs better.

The effort is small next to the cost of a bad instruction copied across the whole team. Even when the tool offers built-in evaluation, as in Microsoft's announcement, the criteria in step 2 remain the job of whoever knows the task.

---

## Sources

- Microsoft Tech Community, Microsoft SharePoint Blog, "What's New in Copilot in SharePoint: September 2026", September 2, 2026.

*Future in Use is an editorial initiative linked to OperOS AI.*