Claude Cowork Tutorial for Beginners (2026)

Key Takeaways

Hello everyone and welcome to this video. In this video, I'm going to show you how to use Claude Co-work to automate tasks directly inside of your computer. So, let's go ahead and get started. So, I want you first to navigate to claude.com/prouct/cowwork. And here you will be able to download Claude desktop app. So, inside this app, you will have the ability to use Claude chat. And this is kind of a regular chat GPT kind of prompting. You also have claude co-work available as well. So claude co-work this is an agentic AI capability tool that allows you to work directly inside a folder directly on your computer. So it can go you can direct it to an Excel sheet for example. It can open that sheet. It can do analysis for you. It can send emails and so on. So first I want you to please download claude here and uh if you click here you should be able to download it for Windows for Mac OS as well and also if you have the ARM 64 as well option too here. So just if you maybe running Windows like me just click Windows here and you just follow along with the steps log in with your email and if everything works you should be directed to an app that looks like this. So basically what you see is on the top side here you see there is claude chat. This is the chat GPT kind of version of this. Of course, you can use it to write, you can use it to learn, you can use it to write code for example. And of course, you can go come here and you can select what model you would like to run. Please note that right now you can use the sonnet 4.6 and this is a model that is efficient for everyday task. You can also have claude opus 4.6 which is one of the most powerful models available by anthropic. There's also another one which is the highq 4.5. Think of it as more mostly like faster model for quick efficient responses. Okay. So if you go ahead and shift to co-work now what you could do you can basically direct the AI agent to go and work directly inside of a folder. So for example now you can come here you can say choose a different folder and that's what I'm going to be doing now. And I'm going to navigate to the desktop and here I got a folder. We called it small business. So I'm going to select the small business folder. And Claude here is going to ask me, okay, are you sure? Do you want to run that? I'm going to say sure. Allow it access to that folder. So I'm going to say allow. And right now you have that AI agent basically running directly inside of your folder here, which is a small business. So the inside the small business, what I've done here is I included these examples. Okay? So I included receipts, I included invoices, and I also included contracts as well. Let's say for a for a business. So let's say if you open one of these receipts, this is an example of a receipt. Let's say it's a steakhouse for example. I included numbers here. Let's say and this is the total amount for example in dollar uh in dollars. You can also see as well there is another receipt here for let's say Delta Airlines. Okay. And you can see the total is 607 USD. And I actually intentionally did this like I included two receipts with two currencies. One of them is in US dollars, the other one is in Canadian dollars. Just to see if the AI AI agent actually has an understanding of this and is able to do as well currency conversion because I'm going to simply ask the agent to go inside that folder. I want you to organize that folder for me. I want you to put these receipts in a separate folder. I want you to put these two invoices in a separate one and also the consulting ones in a separate folder as well. And I also want you to sum up these receipts amount and put them in an Excel sheet. And that will be kind of what we want Claude Co-work to do for us. So now if I go ahead and open let's say one of these invoices. This is an example invoice here. You can see this is let's say OpenAI API billing amount. This is a total here. You can also see another let's say invoice here by let's say Blue Peak. That's another invoice too. Okay. And you can see there's a total amount of let's say 9K. Let's keep going. If I go back here, you can see they also included two uh contracts too. So that's an an example of an agreement. Let's say software development agreement or SDA. And now you can see kind of the total project value. Again, all of these are kind of um examples here. And please note that I've included all the prompts that we are going to run together here in this document. So in this document now, we should see all the prompts. And the first prompt is going to be for that demo, which is using cloud core work to organize files. So, what I'm going to do here is really I'm just going to copy that prompt. I'm going to come back here and I'm going to again direct claude opus 4.6 to work directly inside that small business folder and I'm just going to paste that prompt here and just say let's go. So, here we go. Let's give it a try. Basically, what you see right now is claude co-work starting up. It's going to be directed again to that folder. And think of it as now you have an AI agent having access to your computer. It's going to start thinking and if you come here you should be able to see all the tasks as well if it starts to create tasks for example you can also see it started to read a file we call it skill.md and I'm going to share an entire module covering skills uh later on in the video but basically you see right now cloud co-work basically creating a tasks here on the right hand side it's going to read and categorize all the files it's going to create category folders and moving files it's going to extract receipts total and now you'll see that basic is kind of striking off tasks on its to-do list which is mind-blowing. Please note as well that what I've done here is I ensure that humans are in the loop, right? So I want to make sure that claude it's not going to go and delete maybe all my files for example. So you can see here it's coming back and it's telling you okay I can see all the files let me now create the category folders and it found that okay now I need to request delete permission to move other than just copy the original files out of the root folder. So please note that again like all of these tools are still kind of under research and I strongly recommend that you have a copy of any folders or any files that you're working with somewhere else. And um what you see as well is actually wrote off these two tasks allowing me. Okay, are you allowing or or denying. So I'm going to say sure allow. And now it's going to start continuing and working on it. Please note that here on the bottom you should see context and now you should see skills. So basically these agents how they work they are equipped with skills. These skills are files. Okay, we call them markdown files. Just think of it as just a text file that includes a description of that agent capability. So now the agent can go it can basically create PowerPoint presentations, write Excel sheets and so on. And all of these are we call them skills. Going to have again entire video coming up next on that. So he's going to tell me okay allow cloud to permanently delete files in your small business folder during this task. I'm going to say sure allow. Basically, what it's doing, it is moving these files from the main small business year folder to my newly created folders. So, here we go. So, now it's going to tell me the three doc files appear to be locked possibly in Word. Okay, that's actually a good point because I have them open. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and actually close them because it is it wants to access them, right? Which is actually quite smart, right? So, actually understood what I mean here because I have them opened. It wasn't able to move them. So, let's see actually what the agent is going to do. It's probably going to create a copy out of this. So, let's maybe I'm going to close everything. I'm going to close also the consulting agreement here as well just to make it easier for the agent. And here we go. So, it actually seems like it worked. Okay. So, now you should see it was able to Okay, it said I created these folders. I included receipts. I have invoices. I have agreements. What it did as well here it said okay receipts total in the Excel sheet. So, it got the Delta Airlines which is 607 USD. also got the roses Chris which is around 305 and here it's going to tell you combined is 913 and it's actually telling you this mixes USD and Canadian flagged in the sheets. So actually understand that these two are two different currencies. Please note that all these LLMs or large language models they have seen the entire internet. So they have seen every single Wikipedia page. They have read every single dollar amount available on the web. They read every single news. So they know the idea or the meaning of currencies that USD and Canadian are different and so on. What you see as well is if you go on the top right corner here under progress now you see all these tasks that the agent created. For example, you can see that it read and categorize all files here. Okay, it create category folders and move files. Extract receipts, create Excel sheet and verify Excel output has no errors. Okay, so one point before we actually go ahead and open what cloud did for us, you will find that always at the end it has that verification process. Think of it as you have a brain, right? And this is the claude opus 4.6 which is powering one of the AI agents running behind the scenes. But what these models work, they work in what we call it evaluator optimizer loop. So think of it as basically you have the agent generating an output and it's going to do and do a self-reflection basically loop. So that means it's going to go and going to reflect on its output. It's going to go make sure that the numbers make sense. And we found that just by running this agentic loop here by an agent generating an output and then another agent actually making basically evaluating that response and making sure that everything works dramatically improves the agent output and agent performance. So now let's go ahead and head back to our Okay, so this is a small business folder here. You will find that actually created the agreements. So these are the um agreements. So it was able to get the consulting agreement. That's right. The property guru one. That's good. If you go to invoices now, I should see these two invoices here have been categorized too. And you'll also see the receipts as well. So, it was able to put the receipts in the right folder. Please note that here you will find that it was actually trying to delete those. So, it took a copy. It was trying to delete them, but because I had them open, it just kept them there, right? Okay. So, if you actually close them, you should be able to find that it already organized them quite well. And let's open the receipts summary. And let's see. And here we go. Now, it was able to extract the amount. This is the um amount here. Um and this is the other one as well and was able to tell you okay total combined USD and Canadian amounts convert to a single currency for accurate total. So actually understand that here we have two different currencies. Please note that you can also click on view your receipt spreadsheets and claude's going to open the spreadsheet on the right hand side. So you'll be able to view it here directly along with the prompts and the chain of reasoning or chain of thoughts. Okay. So, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to maybe have a follow-up question and ask the agent, okay, to simply convert from USD to, let's say, Canadian, okay, and update the sheet and update the Excel sheet. Let's go ahead and give it a try and see if the agent is smart enough to go take that US dollars, convert them. Should be like times 1.3, 1.35, and hopefully it's able to understand what I mean here. It's going to create a to-do list for you. It's going to search the web. Probably it want to let's actually close that. It's probably wanted to load the exchange rate from US dollars to Canadian. It's going to update the Excel sheet with a converted amount and verify the updated Excel file as well. Please note as well that here on the bottom it was able to show you this is the web search. So it did actually web search here and it downloaded the Excel um skill. You will find as part of the skills now it needs that XLSX skill to be able to go and write directly inside that Excel sheet. So now it's actually telling you the current rate it's actually 1.43 43 slightly high but it seemed that if you make it slightly bigger now you should see that these are all the websites that the agent was able to research to get that exchange rate right and it came back here and it's asking me okay do you want to allow I'm going to say sure allow it and what I found is that actually a lot of developers that I talked to at one of the top frontier labs um basically 90% of the time they actually not writing code what they're doing they are orchestrating a team of AI agents that can work autonomously on your behalf and really all all they're doing most of the time they are just pressing enter to make sure that they are as a humans they are human in the loop. Okay, of course they do a strategy. They wanted to um uh on board these agents and actually make them run as well. So it's not a trivial task but these agents became incredibly powerful. It makes zero sense to go and do all these tasks on personally like manually similar to what we used to do before. So here we go. So I'm going to tell you that Delta Aine is 607 multiply times 1.4 that has been converted to $800 Canadian. It kept the same amount. It's telling you no conversion needed. So, it actually has an understanding of that. It summed them up. And let's go ahead and update or view the updated Excel sheet. And look at this. So, now it was able to extract the updated amount here. So, it made the conversion. So, this is great. It summed them up and now we got $1,178. With that, that's all I have for this video. I hope you enjoyed it and see you in the next