What you need to use Cowork to its fullest - Claude Tutorial

Before we start changing our workflows, let's talk about a few requirements for trying Cowork. First, it requires a paid account. At the moment, Cowork is available to pro and max subscribers. Free accounts cannot run Cowork tasks. That's because Cowork runs longer, higher effort tasks and uses a lot of system level access, which isn't quite reasonable for a free tier. If you're in the claude.ai chatbot, you can go right here to your account settings and click on upgrade plan to change the plan that you have access to. By the way, availability may also be region limited at this time. And while Anthropic continues to roll out Cowork, features may change quickly. You're going to need the desktop app, which you can get by going to your settings and clicking on download Claude Cowork right here. This will download an app that you can run and install. Once you have the app, you'll notice that there's a Cowork tab right here. To follow along with this course, you're also going to need to download the project files from the LinkedIn Learning website. I've already placed the files into a single folder. The folder consists of spreadsheets as well as PDFs and PowerPoints. When using Cowork, you'll be working with tasks instead of chats. In the center, you may see a series of quick suggestions like create a file, crunch data, make a prototype, and others. Before you do anything with tasks, you'll have to to get started by asking Cowork to focus on a specific folder to do the tasks from. And you can see folders that you've given previous permissions for, as well as the ability to choose a folder. From here, I'll choose the work folder. And then since I'm going to be working with this project over different videos, I'll tell it that it can always have permissions to take a look at these files and work with them. You can also add additional connectors or other files manually right here. Connectors give you access to things like your Google Drive, your emails, the ability to control your Mac or your browsers. You can always manage the connectors that you have access to right here. There's lots to pick from, and you can even add your own custom connector. You can also take a look at what are called desktop extensions. This is where you can give Claude access to the file system and create more complex interactions. If you click on browse extensions, you'll be taken to this window in in which you can search for and take a look at a large quantity of additional desktop extensions. This is also where you can manage the web connectors. I'll try a simple prompt. Tell me about the files in this folder with some suggestions on what I could do. As you execute different tasks, you may see different parts of the interface activate. Under working folder, we can see that it has access to the work folder. And you may also see some suggested connectors for doing some tasks. This is a pretty simple task. It answered right away and it didn't generate any specific tasks that needed to be processed. It also didn't create any files, which you would see in this context section. It gave me a good breakdown of what's in that folder, as well as some suggestions on things that I could do. Let's go ahead and pick one of these. I'll choose number four and you can see what happens when we ask for a larger task. This will create a comprehensive executive summary analyzing financial and sales data. When you work with Claude, the process will happen in a protected folder that is stored in a virtual environment to keep your file system safe. Notice that now under progress, we have a list of tasks that Claude is going to execute in order to accomplish our goals and load up different tools. So for example, right now, it's using Python to read and analyze the Excel files. You can take a look at what it's doing by clicking on this triangle right here, and it'll give you more details about the tools that are executing. In the working folder, you'll see that a new file cropped up and also that we have some Scratchpad documents as it goes through and executes the different files. You might see your progress being checked off. While that's working, you can also ask a question or recommend a change to the process. This will be added to the queue as a follow-up task after this task is done. You may also see additional tasks being added right here. Since I don't want it to stop what it was doing, I'll just say please continue. When it's done, it's going to give you a summary, show you the documents that it's created, and let you open up the folder that they're in, which is in the same folder that we started with in this case. This is a pretty thorough executive summary with lots of data from different places. Since this is a Word document, we can open this up in Microsoft Word and edit as usual. You can control which model you're using with this pop-up right here. So perhaps if it's a more complex task, you can choose the Opus model. But for this task, Sonnet 4.5 did a pretty good job. Hopefully, you can see how useful something like Cowork can be in your everyday work, and how having access to local files gives you an edge in analyzing multi-file projects.