Meet Claude |

What Is Claude?

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Claude is an AI assistant for life and work

Claude’s Capabilities

Writing and content creation

Claude can collaborate with you on social media posts, professional emails, and complex reports.

Research and analysis

Claude helps you explore research angles, compile findings, and analyze data to surface meaningful insights. You can upload documents and Claude will help you make sense of complex information.

Coding assistance

Claude can help you write, debug, and explain code across multiple programming languages.

Problem-solving and reasoning

Claude handles complex cognitive tasks, mathematical problems, strategic thinking and analysis, and research.

Learning new things

Whether you’re learning a new skill, exploring unfamiliar domains, or working through complex challenges, Claude can adapt to your learning style and pace.

Accessing Claude

Claude.ai

The primary way most people interact with Claude. Here, you can ask questions, brainstorm ideas, create and edit documents, and a lot more.
Claude.ai is ideal for conversations, writing assistance, research, analysis, and creating files.

Claude Code

An agentic coding tool that is designed for developers but can be used for all kinds of file manipulation on your desktop.
Claude Code can directly edit files, run commands, and create commits.

Claude Tag

Brings Claude directly into Slack. You can chat with Claude in the AI assistant header from any channel or conversation, or by tagging Claude in threads.
When you connect Slack to Claude, Claude searches your workspace’s channels, direct messages, and shared files to find the context you need for better responses and research.

Claude Design

Turns ideas into working interfaces. Describe what you want — or start from a sketch or screenshot — and Claude builds an interactive prototype you can refine and hand off to your team.
It works inside any conversation with Claude on paid plans, and as a dedicated space at claude.ai/design.

Claude for Microsoft 365

Brings Claude into Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook as a sidebar, so you can analyze, draft, and edit inside the document you already have open — and carry context from one app to the next.

Your First Conversation with Claude

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Writing Effective Prompts

All interactions with Claude begin with a prompt, and these prompts, combined with other context, impact Claude’s response. The best approach when speaking to Claude is like you would a coworker—naturally, concisely, and conversationally.

Setting the stage

What is your role and what are your objectives?
Is there context about your work that Claude should know about?

Defining the task

What action do you want Claude to take?
Do you want Claude to write, analyze, build, or something else?

Specifying rules

What’s the style or tone you want Claude to use?
Are there examples that you can attach to show Claude what you’re looking for?

Example

Here’s an example prompt that uses all three elements:

I’m the marketing lead at an indie streaming startup, and we’re preparing an investor pitch deck for Series A investors. Can you research the current state of the independent film streaming market and identify key trends, competitor positioning, and growth opportunities? Use current web research with citations and structure it as a professional report of up to 5 pages, with an executive summary, market analysis, competitive landscape, and growth opportunities.

Setting the stage. We tell Claude this is for an investor pitch deck for a new indie streaming app—that’s the context and objective.
Defining the task. We provide the specific action (research the market) with relevant details (trends, competitors, opportunities).
Specifying rules. We ask for current web research with citations, structured as a professional report—telling Claude exactly what style and format we need.

Adding Context

Uploads, connectors, and custom preferences offer ways to give Claude even more context about your work.

Claude can analyze both text and visual elements (like images, charts, and graphics) in PDFs and other documents. Supported file types include PDF, DOCX, CSV, TXT, and common image formats like PNG and JPEG.

Once uploaded, Claude will automatically attempt to parse the file’s content. In the chat, the file appears as an attachment and you can then prompt Claude about it.

Some practical ways to use file uploads

Upload a document and ask Claude to summarize the key points
Share an image and ask Claude to describe or analyze what it sees
Attach a spreadsheet and ask Claude to identify trends in the data
Upload code and ask Claude to explain how it works or find bugs

Tip

If you’d like Claude to consider specific preferences in every response, go to Settings > Account > ‘Instructions for Claude’ to set preferences that apply to every conversation.

Iterating on Claude’s Responses

Conversations with Claude are meant to be iterative. The real power of Claude comes with continued and frequent communication, not just one-off prompts.

If Claude’s first response isn’t quite what you wanted, you have several options:

Ask follow-up questions

Build on Claude’s response by asking for more detail, a different angle, or clarification.

Example: “Can you expand on the second point?” or “That’s helpful, but can you make it more concise?”

Provide feedback

Tell Claude what you liked and didn’t like about its response.

Example: “This is good, but the tone is too formal. Can you make it more conversational?”

Redirect or restart

If Claude went in a different direction than you intended, simply steer it back. “Actually, I was asking about X, not Y. Let me clarify…”.

Worst case, restart your conversation in a new chat to fully refresh the context.

Tip

You can also click the pencil icon on any of your messages to edit and resubmit your prompt — useful when you want to refine your request rather than add a new message.

Personalizing Claude

There are two features that help Claude work better for you over time to increase the power of your prompts.

Memory

Automatically saves key context from your conversations — your role, preferences, past decisions, and working style — so you don’t have to repeat yourself every time you start a new chat.

Skills

Reusable sets of instructions that teach Claude how to approach specific tasks and workflows.
They can encode your preferences for everything from how you write and the output formats you want to the specific processes you follow, the expertise you want applied, or how you like different types of work handled.
Claude applies them automatically whenever they’re relevant

Getting Better Results

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Common Challenges and How to Fix Them

Challenge	What’s happening	Try this to fix
Claude’s response is too generic	Your prompt didn’t include enough context about your specific situation	Add details about your audience, role, or constraints. Example: Instead of “Write an email about the project delay,” try “Write an email to our enterprise client explaining that the software integration will be delayed by two weeks. They’ve been patient so far but this is the second delay. Keep it professional but apologetic.”
The response is too long (or too short)	Claude is guessing at appropriate length	Be explicit: “Give me a two-paragraph summary” or “Keep this under 100 words” or “I need a comprehensive analysis—length isn’t a concern.”
Claude didn’t follow my format	Claude understood what you want but not how you want it presented	Show, don’t just tell. Provide an example of the format, or describe the structure explicitly: “Use bullet points with bold headers for each section.”
I got confident-sounding information that turned out to be wrong	Claude occasionally generates plausible but incorrect information, especially with specific facts or niche topics	For high-stakes work, verify key facts independently. Ask Claude to cite sources or indicate confidence level. Enable web search to ground responses in current information.
The tone isn’t right	Claude defaults to helpful and professional, which may not match your needs	Describe the tone in plain language: “Make this more conversational” or “This should sound authoritative and formal.” Provide an example of writing in the style you want.

The Iteration Mindset

One of the most important shifts when working with Claude is recognizing that your first prompt rarely produces a perfect result—and that’s okay. Think of your initial prompt as the start of a conversation, not a one-shot request.

Treat first drafts as starting points.

Review what Claude produces, identify what’s working and what isn’t, then refine.
Give specific feedback.

“Make it shorter” is fine, but “Cut the first two paragraphs and make the conclusion more action-oriented” is better.
Know when to start fresh.

If a conversation has gone off track, sometimes it’s faster to open a new chat with a clearer prompt than to try to redirect.

AI Fluency

AI Fluency is the ability to collaborate effectively with AI tools.

The 4D Framework for AI Fluency identifies four core competencies that, when combined, can help you make the most of your AI interactions:

Delegation

Deciding on what work should be done by humans, what work should be done by AI, and how to distribute tasks between them.
Includes understanding your goals, AI capabilities, and making strategic choices about collaboration.

Description

Effectively communicating with AI systems. Includes clearly defining outputs, guiding AI processes, and specifying desired AI behaviors and interactions.

Discernment

Thoughtfully and critically evaluating AI outputs, processes, behaviors and interactions.
Includes assessing quality, accuracy, appropriateness, and determining areas for improvement.

Diligence

Using AI responsibly and ethically.
Includes making thoughtful choices about AI systems and interactions, maintaining transparency, and taking accountability for AI-assisted work.

Evaluating Claude for Your Workflows

Evals (short for evaluations) are a way to develop intuition for assessing Claude’s outputs on the tasks that matter to you. They’re systematic ways to test how well Claude performs on specific types of tasks that matter to you.

Running simple evals helps you:

Understand where Claude adds the most value in your workflow
Identify tasks where you’ll need to provide more context or examples
Build confidence in Claude’s outputs for recurring tasks

A simple eval approach

Gather examples.

Collect 5-10 examples of a task you do regularly—emails you’ve written, reports you’ve created, analyses you’ve done.
Create test prompts.

Write prompts that would generate similar outputs. Include the context you’d naturally have when doing this work.
Compare outputs.

Run your prompts and compare Claude’s responses to your examples. Ask yourself:
- Does Claude capture the key information?
- Is the tone and style appropriate?
- What’s missing or could be improved?
Refine your approach.

Based on what you learn, adjust your prompts, add examples to show Claude what good looks like, or identify where human review is essential.

How You'll Work with Claude on Your Desktop

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Working with Claude on Desktop

The Claude desktop app is your home base for working with Claude. The work sorts into three shapes

Claude Chat: Working with Claude, turn by turn.

You and Claude go back and forth. You ask, Claude answers, you steer, it revises. The thinking happens in the exchange.
Claude Cowork: Handing work off to Claude.

You describe an outcome — a finished brief, a formatted deliverable, a task that runs every Monday — and Claude plans it, does it, and comes back with the result. You review the plan and the output; you don’t stitch the steps together yourself.
Building software with Claude Code.

Claude works directly in a codebase: reading it, writing and testing code, running commands. Built for developers, and worth knowing about even if you never open it.

Claude Chat: Working with Claude, turn by turn

Reach for this when:

The answer changes what you ask next.

You’re brainstorming, and each response opens the next question. You couldn’t have written the whole request up front, because you didn’t know yet.

You want to stay in it.

Drafting, editing, thinking out loud — the point is your judgment on every turn, not a finished thing at the end.

It's quick.

A question, a rewrite, a “what does this mean?” — small enough that setting up a whole task would be overhead.

Try it out when: (for example)

You’re staring at an unfamiliar dashboard. -> Screenshot it and ask “what do these metrics mean?” Claude explains while the dashboard stays in view, and your follow-up (“okay, which of these should I actually worry about?”) is the next turn.
You’re between meetings and need to structure a presentation. -> Talk it through by voice; Claude drafts an outline from what you said; you push back on section three; it revises. Four turns, done before your next call.
You’ve been jotting product-launch ideas across Apple Notes for weeks. -> Ask Claude to pull together everything about the launch, figure out what you left half-finished, and check your other connected tools for gaps. Then work the gaps together.

Claude Cowork: Handing work off to Claude

Instead of asking a question, you hand Claude the whole piece of work — gather the context, do the analysis, produce the finished thing — and it comes back done. You’re delegating, not just chatting.

Reach for this when:

The task has several steps you'd normally do in sequence.

Pull the figures, compare them, draft the summary, format the doc. Handed off, that’s one instruction, not four errands.

The output is finished files, where you need them.

A batch of renamed files, a spreadsheet saved into the right folder, a formatted PDF on your desktop — delivered to your file system, not handed back for you to file away.

The work spans your tools.

Meeting notes in one place, the thread in Slack, last quarter’s numbers in a spreadsheet. Set up a Friday roll-up as a scheduled task and Claude gathers all three itself every time it runs — nothing for you to round up first.

It should happen on a schedule, or while you're doing something else.

A Friday review of what shipped. A Monday briefing that preps you for your next meeting.

Try it out when: (for example)

You want to query all your tools like a database. “Review what we decided about pricing last quarter across meeting notes, Slack, and email, then update the Q3 deck with the findings.” Claude finds the answer across all of them and updates the deck. Hand it off, keep working, check the result.
You have a folder of 50+ project documents — contracts, financial reports, meeting transcripts. Ask Claude to find the ones most relevant to your initiative and produce a summary memo. It reads every page and pulls out the patterns that only emerge from reading all of them. Review fifty like you’d review five.
You do the same work every Monday morning — check messages, assemble a status update, prep for the day’s meetings. Set it up once as a scheduled task, and start Monday with answers instead of admin.

In the desktop app, you can hand off tasks in Cowork. What that gives you today:

Local folder access

Point Claude at a folder; it reads what’s there and saves finished work back to the same place. This is the concrete difference from turn-by-turn Chat, which can read what you upload but hands finished files back as downloads rather than saving them into your folder.

Scheduled tasks

Set a task once — a daily briefing, a weekly roundup, a morning inbox triage — and Claude runs it on the cadence you set. Scheduled tasks run remotely, so they run even when your computer is asleep or the app is closed. A task that needs files on your computer runs locally, only while the app is open.

Subagents

For a big job, Claude splits the work across background workers running in parallel, each with its own context, and hands you one finished deliverable.

Projects.

Group related tasks into a workspace with its own files, instructions, and memory — like projects in Chat, but built around the tasks you run.

Browser use.

With Claude in Chrome, Claude navigates websites and pulls what it finds straight into the task — competitor pricing across ten sites, data from pages with no API.

Computer use

When there’s no connector for what you need, Claude can operate your computer directly — clicking, typing, opening apps — asking permission before each app it touches, with a blocklist for anything off-limits. In research preview on Pro and Max plans.

Plugins

Ready-made bundles of skills, connectors, and agents built for a specific kind of work — a sales plugin, a finance one, a legal one — so Claude works the way that role works. Browse and add them under Customize → Plugins.

Building software with Claude Code

If you write code, the desktop app gives you a full development environment. Claude works directly in your codebase — reading what’s there, writing and modifying code, running commands. Visual diffs show what changed, a built-in terminal shows commands as they run, and git tracks every version so you can always roll back.

You choose where the work happens:

Local

Select a folder on your computer and Claude works directly with those files — reading your project, using local tools, and running a development server you can preview in your browser.

Cloud

Connect a GitHub repository and Claude works in a cloud environment. Sessions continue even if you close the app, so you can start a big refactor and check back later. Good for larger codebases, or when you want to keep the work off your machine.

You also choose how much Claude does on its own, with settings including:

Manually approve. Claude proposes every change and waits for your approval.
Accept edits. Claude applies file edits automatically.
Plan. Claude creates a plan before making changes.

Choosing the Right Shape for the Task

You’re about to…	The shape it takes	Where it lives today
Ask, brainstorm, draft, or think something through, turn by turn	Working with Claude, turn by turn	Chat (quick entry, dictation, screenshots)
Hand off a multi-step task that ends in a finished deliverable, spans your tools, or runs on a schedule	Handing work off	Cowork (folder access, connectors, scheduled tasks, subagents)
Write, test, run, and ship code in a codebase	Building software	The Code tab (Local or Cloud)