Your first task

One folder, one brief, one result. This lesson does the sales exports by hand, badly, so the rest of the course has something to improve.

Starting a task is two steps. Choose Cowork in the message box, and describe the work. There is nothing to set up first, which is the right way to meet it: give it something real and see what comes back.

The first brief, written the way most people write it

Clean up my sales exports and make me a summary.

That will produce something. It will also produce a different something next month, because nothing in it says which files, what clean means, what belongs in the summary or who reads it. Every one of those gaps gets filled by a guess.

The same job, said properly

In the folder Sales/2026, there are monthly CSV exports.

Combine them into one spreadsheet with these columns: date, region,
product, units, revenue. Dates as YYYY-MM-DD. Drop rows with no
revenue figure. Regions are spelled inconsistently: treat "APAC",
"Asia Pacific" and "asia-pac" as one region.

Then write a one page summary for a sales manager: total revenue by
region, the three products that grew most, and anything that looks
like a data problem rather than a business problem.

Save both in the same folder.

It is longer, and length is not the point. The point is that every sentence removes a guess. Which files. What the columns are. What to do with the mess you already know about. Who the summary is for, which decides what goes in it. Where to put the result.

The last paragraph is the one people forget: telling it to flag data problems separately from business findings. Without that, a broken export quietly becomes a business insight.

What happens next

You can watch it go, or you can leave. Leaving is the whole point of Cowork, and lesson 4 is about writing a brief that survives you leaving.