Summary  
This chapter covers how to decompose a broad skill into a small, ordered set of concrete subskills to create a clear, manageable progression.  

General domain of usage  
Spreadsheet training and proficiency mapping

"Excel" isn't one skill — it's a stack of them. Basic formulas, lookups, pivot tables, conditional formatting, data validation, array formulas. Before Claude can track progress on any of it, that stack needs to be broken into pieces that can each be checked on their own.



### What a Good Skill Map Looks Like

* **5 to 7 subtopics** — enough to be useful, not so many it's unmanageable;
* **Ordered by difficulty** — so you know what to tackle first;
* **Concrete, not vague** — "XLOOKUP and nested lookups," not "advanced formulas".



> ## Task
> Ask Claude to break your goal down using whatever's already in your workspace:
>
> > <b>Look at my learning goal in the goals folder and break the skill into 5 to 7 subtopics, ordered from easiest to hardest. Save it as skill-map.md in the same folder.
>
> Check the order — if something feels out of place (like pivot tables listed before basic formulas), push back and ask Claude to reorder it.

Get hands-on experience with building a personal AI learning system using Claude, from mapping your skill gaps and writing structured prompts to building agents that read your notes and scores and recommend what to study next.

Discover how to set up a personal learning workspace, define a specific skill map for what you want to learn, and run a quick diagnostic to see exactly where you're starting from.

Explore the essentials of writing structured prompts with context, instruction, format, and constraint, then practice the same skill through quizzes, explain-it-back exercises, and real-world scenarios.

Get hands-on experience with Claude tools like notion page and spreadsheet analyze, then build single- and multi-tool agents that read your notes and scores to recommend what to study next.