What you are going to build
Cowork is Claude doing knowledge work on your files, on its own, and handing back finished documents. This course is about giving it work you can actually leave it with.
Chat answers questions. Cowork takes a job. You describe what you want, Claude plans it, runs the steps, and comes back with a spreadsheet, a document or a deck. The interesting part is not that it can. It is what you have to say, and what you have to set up, for the result to be worth having.
The job this course does
One folder of monthly sales exports, the kind every team has: a few CSV files with inconsistent column names, some blank rows, and a date format that changes halfway through the year. Every month somebody spends an afternoon turning it into a clean sheet, a page of numbers for the manager, and five slides.
By the last lesson that afternoon runs on a schedule, with its own instructions and its own written procedure, and the output arrives before anyone asks for it.
What you will have set up
| What | Why it is there |
|---|---|
| A brief that works unattended | So a task run at 6am does not need you at 6am |
| A project | So the context of this job does not have to be retyped every month |
| Global instructions | So how you like things done is true everywhere |
| A skill | So the cleaning steps happen the same way every time |
| A schedule | So it starts without you |
| An approval mode chosen on purpose | So the risk matches the job |
How this course is written
Cowork has no terminal, so there is very little to capture. Two lessons carry a program you can run in the panel beside the reading, because a skill file has a shape that can be checked. Everything else is described in plain words. No screenshots are invented here, and nothing on this site is shown as output unless a program printed it.
Every statement about how Cowork behaves comes from Anthropic's own documentation, and the lessons say so where the behaviour is easy to get wrong.
- Find a folder of yours that gets the same treatment every month. That is your example for this course.
- Write down, in one sentence, what a good result would look like. Keep it.
Every expert started right here.