Claude on the web: beyond the basics
⚡ Key takeaways
- Seven short, hands-on guides for people who already chat with Claude and want to get more done.
- Not sure where to start? Part 1 takes about 20 minutes and works on Free.
- Most of it works on Free. Each part says what needs Pro or a work account.
- Every exercise ends with a check, so you know the result is right before you use it.
You can hold a conversation with Claude. Now you want it to remember your project, build a page instead of describing one, follow your own checklist, read your Google Drive, or research a question with sources. This Claude tutorial walks you through each of those with one small exercise per part. Every exercise uses the same example, a neighborhood reading group, so you can focus on the feature instead of the scenario.
New to Claude? Start with Claude on the web: a beginner’s guide for accounts, first chats, prompting, uploads, memory, and usage limits.
The learning path
Read in order, or jump to the part that solves your problem today.
- Claude desktop app: Chat, Cowork, and Code. Learn when to chat and when to hand off a whole task, then have Claude turn rough notes into a clean status file.
- Claude Projects: reusable context and clear instructions. Save a brief and your rules once, so every new chat starts with them.
- Claude artifacts: create docs, slides, and designs. Get a page you can edit instead of a paragraph of tips, then export or share it.
- Claude Skills: turn a workflow into a reusable skill. Explain a procedure once and let Claude apply it whenever it fits.
- Claude connectors: connect your tools and find information. Let Claude read a Google Doc and check its answer against the original.
- Claude Research: investigate a question and check sources. Get a short, sourced brief and test whether the sources hold up.
- Put Claude to work: PowerPoint, data, quotes, Chrome, and schedules. Five real tasks beyond the chat, each with steps and a check.
What you need
The steps start in Claude Desktop on Windows, with claude.ai as an alternative. Which plan each part needs:
- Free: Projects, artifacts (Docs, Slides, and Design), Skills, and connectors (parts 2 to 5).
- Pro or higher: Cowork (part 1) and Research (part 6). Both parts include a Free alternative.
- Team or Enterprise: shared projects and Enterprise Search. They are explained briefly; you don’t need them for the exercises.
The artifacts overview shows the current availability of each artifact type.
Check before you rely on it
Anthropic’s introduction to Claude explains that Claude is guided by principles meant to make it a safe and beneficial AI system, an approach called Constitutional AI. That shapes how it behaves, but it doesn’t make every answer correct. You decide what to hand over, and you check the result.
Once a workflow becomes routine, test it the way the course’s lesson on getting better results suggests:
- Pick a recurring task where you already know what a good result looks like.
- Collect three or four past examples, including one awkward one.
- Write down what a correct result must keep and must never invent.
- Run each example through Claude.
- Compare the results with your examples and note what went wrong.
If you can’t check a task’s output, don’t hand it off yet.
Going further
This series follows the topics of Anthropic’s free Claude 101 course, with our own exercises. For the official quiz and completion badge, see the course’s next steps. To build an AI assistant that runs on your own PC, the agentic AI series is a separate, more technical track.