Your Gems End 17 Nov — Build the Free Gemini Skill That Writes Your Weekly Report

AI WorkStack · Article version of our video · Published 11 November 2026

Here is the finished result first: a whole team's week — 181 hours, 50 tasks done, 3 things blocked — turned into a finished weekly report by one free Gemini Skill, one slash command, in about 60 seconds. No retyping the same instructions every Friday. This article builds that Skill with you, step by step, and then shows you how to rescue your old Gems before they are deleted.

The two dates you need

Google is replacing Gems with Skills. For personal accounts (18+), per Google's own help page:

• 17 November 2026 — Gems go read-only. You can still open and look at them, but you cannot use, edit or create new ones.
• 17 December 2026 — Gems are deleted completely. Anything you have not saved by then is gone.

Google says it will convert most Gems into Skills automatically — most, not all (Step 3 below shows what gets dropped). Skills themselves are free, work inside your normal Gemini chat, and your first one takes about 3 minutes to build. (Workspace business and education accounts transition later, in 2027.)

Step 1 — Build the Skill (about 3 minutes)

On a computer, open gemini.google.com, go to Customize in the sidebar (under "More" if you do not see it), then Skills → Create → Create manually. Fill in three fields:

Name — lowercase, with hyphens, because this is what you will type after the slash:

weekly-report

Description — this is what Gemini reads to decide when to use the Skill on its own, so write what it is for:

Turns a week's task sheet into a finished weekly report for my team lead.

Instructions — the actual job, in four lines:

1. Read the attached sheet, add up hours and completed tasks per person and for the whole team.
2. List the top 3 wins, the 3 blocked items, and the 3 priorities for next week.
3. Write it as a short report — headline numbers first, then wins, then blocked, then next week, no jargon, no filler.
4. Never invent numbers — if a cell is blank, write "not reported".

Save it. That is the whole Skill — and you will never retype those four lines again.

Step 2 — Run it: one slash, about 60 seconds

Open a fresh chat, type / and pick weekly-report (on some accounts the shortcut is @), attach this week's task sheet, and send. Here is what came back in the video's live test, on a demo team's week:

The report led with those totals, then the top win (Kabir shipped the checkout fix on Thursday), then the 3 blocked items — the client approval, the server access and the design sign-off — then next week's 3 priorities. The same report used to take the team lead about an hour of retyping every Friday.

Step 3 — Save your Gems before 17 December

Do not rely on the automatic conversion being kind to your Gems. Open each one now and check two things:

• Size. A Skill holds at most 100 MB of files. If a Gem is over that, Google drops the largest files first — silently.
• File types that do NOT carry over at all: audio, video, GitHub files, old .doc / .xls / .ppt files, and .zip archives. Download those before 17 December or they are gone with the Gem. What does carry over: the instructions, and plain-text, PDF and image files.

The move is simple: this week, open your Gems, download anything on the do-not-carry list, and rebuild the ones that matter as Skills — one Skill per repeated job, the way Step 1 just did.

Step 4 — Know the limits before you plan around them

Skills do not yet work with Canvas, Deep Research, Create video, Create music or Guided Learning. If your repeated job lives in one of those, a Skill will not run there.

What Skills do work with: normal Gemini chat, and your connected apps — Gmail, Calendar and Drive — so a Skill can pull real data instead of guessing. You can also stack two or three Skills in one prompt, and you can create as many as you like (up to 100 can be active at once). Manage, switch off or delete Skills in Settings → Skills — not from inside a chat.

One more timing note: Skills are rolling out gradually (started 13 October, finishing around mid-November). If your account does not show Skills yet, check again in a few days — and do not pay anyone for access, because Skills are free.

Common mistakes

• Saying "Gems are deleted on 17 November." Wrong — 17 November is read-only; deletion is 17 December. The month between them is your rescue window.
• Paying for a plan to "unlock" Skills. Skills work on the free plan. No subscription is needed.
• Assuming the automatic conversion keeps everything. Files over the 100 MB limit lose the largest first, and audio, video, GitHub files, old Office formats and archives do not convert at all.
• Writing a vague Skill description. The description is how Gemini decides when to apply the Skill by itself — describe the job it is for, not what you wish it was.
• Letting the Skill invent numbers. Always carry the "never invent numbers — write 'not reported'" line in report-style Skills.

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