Claude Cowork
Claude Cowork is the mode of the Claude desktop app where Claude works with the files in a folder you give it: it reads, organizes and creates documents and spreadsheets over several steps, with no coding or terminal required.
Select any words here to ask your Maestro about them.
You have 32 receipt photos in a folder and want a spreadsheet with each one's date, merchant and total. You don't code. Where would you do it?
What it's for: multi-step office work on your files: turning receipt photos into an expense sheet, sorting and renaming documents, drafting a report from scattered notes, pulling data out of PDFs into Excel. It's an AI agent for people who don't code.
How it works: it lives in the Claude desktop app. You give it access to a folder and describe the job in words; Claude makes a plan, carries it out and leaves the results as files in that folder. It's built on the same foundation as Claude Code, minus the terminal, and it can use skills and connectors.
Good to know: it only sees the folders you give it, the app has to stay open while it works, and what it does with your data can contain mistakes like any AI's. Hand it copies when the job moves or deletes files, and check the result before you send it on.
Availability and plans change often; check Anthropic's page.
How it's used
Receipts into a spreadsheet
Folder: Receipts-October (32 photos)
- Pick the Receipts-October folder in Cowork.It can only work with what's in the folders you give it.
- Ask: "Make a sheet with the date, merchant, total and category of each receipt. Flag any you can't read."What you type is a prompt, just like in the chat.
- Cowork shows you its plan and gets going: reads each photo, builds the sheet, logs its steps.You can follow along and stop it.
- marked: expenses-october.xlsx lands in the folder, with 3 receipts flagged for review.The result is a file of yours, not an answer in a chat. Check the flagged ones and a few at random.
When to look closer
Chat, Cowork or Claude Code?
Which one for...?
- Brainstorming subject lines for an email
- Sorting 200 PDFs by client and building an index in Excel
- Writing and testing a script that cleans the sales CSV every week
Which of the three tools would you use for each task?
Ask your Maestro about Claude Cowork
It answers from the free course page closest to this word, the way it answers while you study.
You: What does "Claude Cowork" mean, in plain words?
Your Maestro: I'll explain it with a case of yours: it sticks better than a definition. Which job involving a pile of files would you like to hand off?
Asking about: Answers from the page "Why does my Desktop say OneDrive?"
Only this browser keeps what you ask here. How it works
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Related terms
- AI agent
A program that pairs a language model with tools, such as terminal commands and files, to carry out a task in several steps: it reads its context, acts, looks at the result and repeats.
- Claude Code
Claude Code is Anthropic's AI agent that works on your computer: it reads your project's files, runs commands and makes changes over several steps, asking your permission for what matters. You use it from the terminal, the desktop app or editors like VS Code.
- Agent skill
A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file that teaches an AI agent a procedure: when to use it (its description) and how to do it. The agent reads only the description up front and loads the rest when a task calls for it.
- MCP (Model Context Protocol)
An open standard for connecting AI agents to outside tools and data sources, such as databases, APIs or documents, through one kind of connector.