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Skills are the core building blocks of ABBYY Vantage: trained, reusable units that classify documents, extract data, or orchestrate an end-to-end processing workflow. Everything you process in Vantage runs through a skill.

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Choose your starting point

How you work with skills depends on how much customization you need:

Skill Catalog

Start with a pre-trained skill for common document types like invoices, receipts, and tax forms. No training required.

Skill Designer

Build and customize skills in the browser: define fields, set up business rules, and assemble processing workflows.

Advanced Designer

Use the desktop application for complex extraction logic: custom activities, extraction rules, FlexiLayouts, and prompt-based LLM extraction.
Rule of thumb: check the Skill Catalog first. If a pre-trained skill covers your document type, derive from it and adjust, which is far faster than training from scratch. Use Skill Designer for most custom skills, and reach for Advanced Designer when you need extraction logic the browser tool cannot express. Not sure whether to start from a pre-trained skill or build new? See Choose between Base, Derived, and New skills.

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Common tasks

Beginner-friendly, step-by-step guides for the workflows most people set up first:

Choose between Base, Derived, and New skills

Decide which skill approach fits your document type and start with the right foundation

Process documents with SFTP

Create a Process skill and set up automated document processing via SFTP

Configure PDF Processing Mode

Choose the right PDF Processing Mode in OCR skills and Process skills for your documents

LLMs in ABBYY Vantage

Understand how LLM connections and prompt-based extraction fit together, and when to use them

Configure LLM connections

Connect Vantage to OpenAI, Microsoft Foundry, or Google AI Studio for AI-powered extraction

Extract data with prompt-based activities

Use natural language prompts to extract data from documents in Advanced Designer

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Before you begin

Most guides assume you have:
  • Access to an ABBYY Vantage tenant
  • A user account with appropriate permissions
  • Basic familiarity with the document types you want to process
Don’t have access yet? Contact ABBYY to request a tenant or trial.