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Cowork, the digital colleague

1. 01Opening Cowork and setting up your first workspace7 min

   Cowork is Anthropic's desktop agent: it requires a paid plan and, to reach your local files, the Claude Desktop application open and connected. Its workspace is a project, which groups attached folders, instructions written once and for all, and a memory that belongs to it.

2. 02What Cowork can reach, and what it must never touch8 min

   Cowork's access breaks down into three distinct layers, connected folders, direct use of your applications and screen, and an isolated network that blocks internal addresses by default; in all three cases, permanently deleting a file always asks for your confirmation.

3. 03Writing a brief Cowork can execute, then reading its plan before it starts8 min

   A good brief names a result, its source, its destination and the workspace concerned, as if for a colleague starting that same day; Cowork answers with a plan that needs reading, because a wrong assumption spotted before execution is corrected at no cost, spotted after it can mean undoing writes already made.

4. 04Choosing your approval level, step by step7 min

   On an account not yet moved to the new experience, the approval modes decide who controls a Cowork action before it runs: you (Manual), Claude itself (Automatic), nobody (No approval). Switch to Manual for sensitive files, accounts or sites, a tool used for the first time, or a mistake that would be hard to undo.

5. 05Rebuilding a real spreadsheet or report, not a draft to fix8 min

   Cowork returns a finished file, a workbook whose formulas genuinely recalculate, a laid out slideshow or a formatted document, not raw text to lay out yourself. Name the exact structure expected or supply a template to copy. A correct figure in a cell does not prove the formula: click on the cell and read it.

6. 06Connectors: what they actually read and write7 min

   A connector's capabilities are checked service by service: they should never be guessed by resemblance to another tool from the same vendor. The Gmail connector can send, reply to and forward messages, with approval requested by default. The Outlook one depends on what an administrator of the account has switched on across the whole organisation.

7. 07Scheduled task or Computer Use: the order Cowork tries7 min

   Cowork tries a connector first, then the desktop application's browser, and direct control of the screen only as a last resort, always in the same order. A scheduled task triggers this same cascade at the set time, with no human watching the screen at the moment it runs.

8. 08Cowork everywhere, who can do what, and the trail left behind9 min

   Cowork runs on desktop, web and mobile, with cloud sessions that keep running with no device switched on. Access depends on the plan: on Enterprise, an administrator must switch it on. On Team and Enterprise, a technical export, limited by default to metadata, exists only if an administrator has set up a collector; it does not cover a local session.