What comes back

Cowork ends in files. Knowing the difference between a file and an artifact decides how you ask for the result.

Ordinary output is what you would expect: a spreadsheet with working formulas, a document, a deck, saved where the task put them and opened in whatever you normally use.

Artifacts are the other kind

An artifact is something interactive that lives in your Claude account: a dashboard, a tracker, a reference page, a comparison tool. You reopen one from the Artifacts view in the sidebar, and you can paste its link into any session and ask for changes, which saves a new version rather than overwriting the old one.

Two details from the documentation are worth knowing before you rely on them. Sharing an artifact means it uses the viewer's access rather than yours, so a colleague opening your dashboard sees it through their own connections. And connector tools that need per-action approval are not available to artifacts at all.

Asking for the right shape

The last row is the one that surprises people. If your dashboard reads a connected app, the person you share it with sees their version of that app, not yours.

Before you trust a produced number

• Ask for the check as part of the brief, from lesson 4. A total restated in the message is a total you can compare.
• Open the file. A spreadsheet with formulas can be checked in a way a screenshot of one cannot.
• Look for the rows it dropped. Good runs say how many; a run that does not say is a run that did not count.