Introduction to Claude Cowork

Introduction to Claude Cowork is a free video course from Anthropic on Cowork — Claude working directly with the files, folders, and apps on your machine, reading, editing, and producing real outputs. Where the chat experience is a conversation, Cowork is a working session: you describe a task, Claude plans and carries it out, and you steer as it goes. The course takes you from first launch to confident daily use. You set up a working folder, connectors, and permissions, then run a complete task end to end — clarifying what you want, steering mid-run, and reviewing the deliverable. From there it shows how to give Claude standing context with global instructions, projects, skills, and plugins so it knows your vocabulary, your steps, and the outputs you expect; how to run recurring work as scheduled tasks and start or check on a task from your phone or a browser; and how to bring Claude into the browser with Claude in Chrome and into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook through add-ins. It closes on working safely in multi-step sessions — reviewing plans and outputs, validating the skills you build, and sharing plugins and workflows with a team. No coding or command-line experience is needed. In September 2026, Anthropic began merging Cowork and chat into one Claude, starting with the Pro and Max plans; Anthropic says what this course teaches still works.