🏢 Badge Check

⭐ Difficulty⏱️ Time 25 min 🧩 ProductsMicrosoft 365 CopilotCopilot CoworkMicrosoft OneDrive🏷️ TagsCustom Skills🏭 IndustriesFacilitiesSecurity

Welcome, agent. Your mission — should you choose to accept it — is Operation Badge Bandit: track down employees who keep forgetting to badge out and get the results into your inbox using Copilot Cowork. 🔍

🔍 The Problem

Building security depends on accurate badge data, but employees forget to badge out all the time. Finding repeat offenders in a CSV, formatting a report, and emailing it takes longer than it should.

📋 What You'll Produce

By the end of this mission, Copilot Cowork will have:

• ✅ Analyzed a badge scan CSV and identified employees who forgot to check out
• ✅ Sent you a summary report via email
• ✅ (With a custom skill) Sent a styled HTML report with color-coded tables that flag the worst offenders

⚙️ Prerequisites

• Microsoft 365 Copilot license: required to access Copilot Cowork (learn more)
• Microsoft 365 license: required for Outlook (to receive the email report) and OneDrive (to store custom skills)
• Anthropic models enabled on your tenant: Copilot Cowork relies on Anthropic models. Ensure your admin has enabled them in the Microsoft 365 admin center
• Copilot Cowork access via the Microsoft 365 Frontier program

🤝 What is Copilot Cowork?

Copilot Cowork is a new way to delegate work to Copilot. You describe what you need and it works across your Microsoft 365 environment to get it done.

It comes with 13 built-in skills:

• Communication: Draft and send emails, post to Teams channels, manage your inbox
• Documents: Create Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and PDFs
• Calendar: Schedule meetings using natural language, manage calendar conflicts, get daily briefings
• Search: Find information and people across your organisation, perform deep research
• Automation: Run prompts on a schedule for recurring tasks

You can also add custom skills stored in OneDrive. It asks for your approval before taking any action.

🎯 The Scenario

You work in facilities security at a company with offices in multiple cities. Every employee badges in and out of their building, but some people forget to badge out at the end of the day. Your manager wants a report identifying repeat offenders so the security team can follow up. You've been handed a CSV export from the badge system and need to find out who keeps forgetting to check out, then email the results.

📁 Lab Assets

This mission uses one source file.

File	What it contains
badge_check.csv	Building access records with employee names, badge IDs, office locations, and entry/exit timestamps. A missing ExitDateTime means the employee forgot to check out.

📥 Download lab assets: badge_check.csv

🧪 Lab 1.1 - Find the Offenders

In this first lab, upload the badge scan file and ask Copilot Cowork to identify who hasn't checked out.

1. Open Microsoft 365 Copilot

2. Select Cowork (Frontier). If you don't see it, select All agents first

   

   You'll land on the Copilot Cowork homepage. From here you can type a new task at the top, try one of the "Get to work" samples, or pick up where you left off from the recent tasks list.

   

   NOTE

   Your Copilot Cowork homepage may look slightly different depending on when you access it.

3. Drag and drop the badge_check.csv file into the conversation

   

4. Add a couple of new lines after the file attachment using Shift + Enter to make some space, then type the following message:

   I've attached a CSV file with badge scan data for our offices. A missing ExitDateTime means the employee forgot to check out. Can you tell me which employees haven't checked out, and send me a summary report via email?

   

5. If it looks like the screenshot above, hit the white circle with the black arrow pointing up in the bottom-right corner to send.

6. Review the steps Copilot Cowork takes. It will analyse the file, identify who hasn't checked out, and send an email with the results.

   

7. Go to outlook.office.com and check your inbox. You should have an email from Copilot Cowork with a summary table of all employees, their badge IDs, missing checkout counts, and which offices were affected.

   

   Verify the email contains:

   • 12 employees listed in the summary table
   • 164 total missing checkout incidents
   • John Doe at the top with the highest count (38)
   • Columns for Badge ID and Offices Affected

   TIP

   If the report is missing employees or the counts look wrong, don't start over. Send a follow-up in the same conversation, like: "The report is missing Ian Wright — can you recheck and resend?" Copilot Cowork will correct and resend without regenerating everything.

You now have a working report in your inbox. Lab 2 builds on this with a formatted HTML report using a custom skill.

🧪 Lab 1.2 - Upgrade with a Custom Skill

Copilot Cowork supports custom skills stored in your OneDrive. A skill is a SKILL.md file with instructions for a specific task. Copilot Cowork discovers your custom skills automatically at the start of each conversation and loads them as needed.

NOTE

You can create up to 20 custom skills. Each SKILL.md file can be up to 1 MB.

How Custom Skills Work

Each custom skill lives in its own subfolder under /Documents/Cowork/Skills/ in your OneDrive. The SKILL.md file has two parts:

1. A YAML frontmatter block with a name and description. Copilot Cowork uses the description to decide when to load the skill
2. Markdown instructions: the actual behaviour you want Copilot Cowork to follow when the skill is active

---
name: My Skill Name
description: A short description of when and why Cowork should use this skill.
---
Your skill instructions go here in plain Markdown.
Tell Cowork exactly how you want it to behave when this skill is active.

Add the Skill

In this mission, you'll create a frontend-design skill that instructs Copilot Cowork to produce polished, self-contained HTML emails whenever it generates a report.

NOTE

The frontend-design skill used in this mission is based on an open-source skill created by Anthropic, available on skills.sh. It has been slightly modified to include responsive design requirements for email output. Skills.sh is a community site with skills you can use with AI tools like Copilot Cowork. Most are development-focused, but there are others worth browsing. Each skill goes through security checks, so you can review whether a skill has passed before using it.

1. Download the SKILL.md file and save it to your device

   The skill tells Copilot Cowork how to format HTML output: pick real fonts instead of system defaults, use a consistent color scheme, and make layouts work on both desktop and mobile. It also has guardrails against generic-looking output (no purple-on-white gradients, no cookie-cutter tables). The result is a report that actually looks like someone designed it.

2. Open OneDrive and navigate to Documents

3. Create the following folder structure (create each folder if it doesn't exist):

   Documents/Cowork/skills/frontend-design/

4. Upload the SKILL.md file into the frontend-design folder

5. Copilot Cowork will automatically discover this skill at the start of your next conversation

Run the Enhanced Mission

1. Open Microsoft 365 Copilot and select Cowork (Frontier)

2. Start a new conversation

3. Add the following prompt to the text box (don't send it yet):

   [file] contains building access records for employees across multiple global office
   locations. Each row represents a badge scan event with the following columns: PersonName, BadgeId, City,
   BuildingName, EntryDateTime, and ExitDateTime.
   
   A missing ExitDateTime means the employee forgot to check out.
   
   Please do the following:
   
   1. Analyze the file and calculate, per person, the total number of entries and how many times they forgot
      to check out (empty ExitDateTime).
   2. Rank the top 10 offenders by checkout-miss count, including their name, badge ID, total entries,
      missed checkouts, and miss rate as a percentage.
   3. Use the frontend-design skill to generate a self-contained (responsive) HTML report that includes a summary header, a styled table of
      the top 10 results sorted by missed checkouts descending, and highlights anyone with a miss rate above
      50% in red.
   4. Email the HTML report to me with the subject line Building Access – Top 10 Checkout Offenders and
      the report embedded in the email body.

   NOTE

   When you paste the prompt, the formatting might look a bit off. You can clean it up by adding or removing any extra newlines.

   TIP

   This prompt uses a pattern you can reuse for any data analysis: (1) describe the data format and columns, (2) define the analysis, (3) specify the output format and skill, (4) set the delivery method. Swap the file and analysis and the same structure works for any dataset.

4. Remove the [file] placeholder

5. Add the badge_check.csv file from last time by selecting + > Upload images and files > select the file on your computer

   

6. Send the prompt by hitting the white circle with the black arrow pointing up in the bottom-right corner

7. Watch the frontend-design skill load in the side panel. Copilot Cowork will now apply your HTML formatting rules

8. Go to outlook.office.com and check your inbox. You should now have a styled HTML report with the top 10 results, miss rates, and red highlights for anyone above 50%.

What Changed?

Open both emails side by side. The first one is a plain text table with all 12 employees. The second has styled rows, actual typography, and color coding for the worst offenders. Same CSV, same agent. The only difference is the skill file you added to OneDrive.

TIP

Want to tweak the report? In the same conversation, try: "Change the red highlight threshold from 50% to 30% and add a column showing each person's most frequent office." Copilot Cowork will update the report and resend it.

🏆 Mission Accomplished

Operation Badge Bandit is complete. One CSV, two reports, one custom skill.

What you saw in action:

✅ One conversation, full workflow: You described the job. Copilot Cowork analyzed the data, built the report, and emailed it.

✅ Custom skills change the output: The same CSV went from a plain text table to a styled HTML report because of one skill file.

✅ Nothing sends without your approval: Copilot Cowork drafted the email and waited for you to review it first.

🏅 Claim your Badge Bandit badge

Congrats, agent — mission accomplished! If you'd like to claim your badge for completing this mission, please submit your badge request:

https://aka.ms/cowork-collective/badge-check/form

Once reviewed, you'll get an email from Global AI Community with instructions to claim your badge.

📚 Related Content

• 📖 Copilot Cowork overview — Microsoft Learn
• 📖 Get started with Copilot Cowork
• 📖 Copilot Cowork skills and custom skills
• 🚀 Join the Microsoft 365 Copilot Frontier program
• 📖 Frontend Design skill (skills.sh)