I use something from Anthropic’s Claude suite almost every day. I think that almost everyone in my sphere of influence should be using them, too. In this series of blog posts, I’ll go through what I use these different tools for and how they help me. The goal is to lower the bar and show the reader how easy it is to start playing around with these tools and start realizing real benefit.
A lot has been written and said lately about trying to gain efficiency by using generative AI. Maybe for large organizations, that’s the goal. I work with a lot smaller companies, though, and I think there’s tons of whitespace around showing people how to use generative AI to help them with tasks that they didn’t think they could do.
A quick example before we get started. I wanted to make an Excel macro that automatically split out a resource scheduling file into a week-by-week schedule, formatted it properly, and saved the previous version for historical reference. It’s been about 30 years since I did any VBA programming, so I wasn’t real confident in my skills.
I told Claude, though, what I wanted to do. I knew enough to open the developer mode and create modules where it told me. After some prompting, Claude was able to write the code for me and debug when it didn’t work. Something that might have taken me a week to figure out how to build was ready to be used within an hour.
This is what I want to help with. Smaller organizations across the country “use ChatGPT” to answer some questions or help with brainstorming or formatting, but there’s real power available by taking that extra step.
What is Claude?
The tricky thing with some of these names is the large language model (LLM) is ALSO called Claude, but in this context, I’m talking about the Claude application. Claude is to Anthropic like ChatGPT is to Open AI. If you frequently “ask ChatGPT” something, you can do the same to Claude. Claude has a web app, a desktop app, a mobile app, a connector in Microsoft 365 apps, and can be used via command line.
If you’re using ChatGPT, you can use Claude in its place.
What is Claude Cowork?
Claude Cowork is more like a true virtual assistant. Where you can ask Claude questions and get well-reasoned answers and even documents generated, Claude Cowork can actually see your screen and help you work inside apps.
You can ask Claude Cowork to actually DO things for you. Let’s say you have a folder full of invoices, and you want a summary made. You can point Claude Cowork to that folder, ask it to look at all the invoices, and summarize them for you in an Excel workbook. In that folder, it will generate an Excel file with your requested results.
What is Claude Code?
This is sort of a weird and wonderful one for someone like me, a business user with a bit of technical aptitude. Claude Code is Claude that lives in your development IDE and can read, write, and run code in your actual project files. Want to connect to an API that doesn’t have an easy to use front-end and download the paginated results into a spreadsheet? Claude Code can build a python project that will do exactly that.
Why do I care about any of this stuff?
I use all of these things on a regular basis. In the following blog posts (providing I don’t get distracted or lose interest), I’ll showcase some ways to get started and what I use them for.
If you need help implementing Claude tools at your small business, let me know at Tapestries Group.
Stay tuned.
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