Claude for Your Team · Lesson 5 of 7

Files, Docs, Slides, Design, Dashboards and connectors

25 minutes. For everyone. Use Claude's documents, decks and dashboards where they help, keep them inside the business, and connect your other tools carefully.

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Most people start with Claude as a chat box. Ask, read, copy, paste. That's fine. But a lot of office work ends in a *thing*: a letter, a one-page flyer, a slide deck for the Monday meeting, a chart of last month's jobs. Claude can make those things directly, and your team can work on them together.

This lesson covers four tools and one rule. The rule first.

Anthropic calls anything Claude makes for you to put in front of someone an artifact: a document, a deck, a design, a dashboard, a small interactive tool. Two facts from Anthropic's help center shape how you use them:

• Artifacts start private to you. Nobody else sees one until you share it.
• Sharing has three levels: inside your organization only, anyone with the link (if your owner allows it), or email invitations to named people outside (if your owner allows it). Lesson 2 asked your owner to decide on the last two.

Your default: share inside the organization. Before you share anything outside, ask yourself whether you'd be comfortable if it were forwarded. A public link can be.

You can attach files to a chat: a PDF of a manufacturer's warranty, a spreadsheet of this month's service calls, a photo of a handwritten note. Claude reads them and works from them.

Three habits:

• Remove what isn't needed. A spreadsheet of jobs doesn't need customer phone numbers to tell you which weeks were busiest. Delete those columns first.
• Say what the file is. "This is our 2026 price book. Use only these prices."
• Check numbers against the source. If Claude adds up a column, spot-check two or three rows yourself before anyone acts on the total.

Anthropic says Docs, Slides and Design are available on all plans and on by default. You can start one three ways: ask for it in a chat, choose Output in the message box and pick a template, or pick one from the Artifacts tab in your sidebar.

Docs are living documents you write with Claude and your team in real time, with comments. Good for: a new procedure, a policy draft, meeting notes everyone adds to. You can export to Word, PDF, Markdown or Google Docs. One limit worth knowing: Anthropic says Docs can't be shared outside your organization yet. For a customer, export it and send it the usual way.

Slides are presentations you can edit slide by slide, present from inside Claude, and export to PowerPoint, PDF or Google Slides. Good for: the monthly team meeting, a training refresher, a pitch to a commercial customer.

Design makes visuals, mockups, one-pagers and landing pages. Good for: a seasonal flyer, a door hanger, a one-page "what's included in our maintenance plan."

How to use them well:

• Start from your real material. "Turn the notes in this chat into a five-slide deck for Monday's meeting" beats "make a deck about safety."
• A person checks every fact before it goes out. A beautiful flyer with the wrong phone number is worse than no flyer.
• Check prices and promises especially. If a flyer says "free estimates" or "same-day service," make sure that's true and approved by whoever sets those policies.

At Comfort Zone, Tina turned the Office Handbook project's files into a ten-slide new-hire walkthrough. Marcus reviewed it, fixed two out-of-date steps, and it's now what every new office hire sees on day one.

Claude Dashboards turns questions about your company's data into charts. You connect a data source, ask in plain language ("service calls by week for the last quarter"), and Claude writes the queries and builds the dashboard. It's in beta, and Anthropic lists it on Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans.

Be realistic about whether it fits you yet:

• It needs a data source. Anthropic lists data warehouses (Amazon Redshift, BigQuery, ClickHouse, Databricks, Snowflake) or apps you've already connected to Claude, such as Salesforce. Most 20-person businesses don't have a data warehouse. If your numbers live in a spreadsheet, attaching the spreadsheet to a chat and asking for a chart is often enough.
• Each chart shows its query and when its data was last refreshed. Read both. A chart is only as good as what it counted.
• It counts toward your usage limits, like the rest of your Claude work.
• Anthropic suggests it for quick, exploratory questions. For your real books, your accounting software is still the source of truth. Don't make a money decision from a dashboard you haven't checked against it.

On Team plans, your owner controls Dashboards in Organization settings > Artifacts.

Connectors let Claude reach into tools you already use: email, calendar, shared drives, a CRM. Instead of downloading a file and attaching it, you ask, and Claude looks.

On a Team plan:

• Your owner adds the connector for the organization (Lesson 2).
• You connect it with your own sign-in, under Customize > Connectors.
• Claude only sees what you can already see in that tool. It acts as you, with your access, not more.

Take Microsoft 365 as an example. Anthropic says it's read-only by default: Claude can search your SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook and Teams, within your own permissions. Sending email, creating files or posting messages requires your owner and IT partner to turn on more. Leave it read-only until you have a specific job that needs more, and a person approving each action.

Connector habits:

• Ask for a draft, then send it yourself. Even when a connector can send, a person sends anything that reaches a customer.
• Be specific about where to look. "Find the warranty PDF for the Carrier unit in the Warranties folder" is faster and safer than "search everything."
• If Claude finds something you shouldn't have access to, tell your owner. It means a permission in the other tool is too wide, and that's worth fixing whether or not you use Claude.

When you're ready to hand Claude a whole job, not just a question (sorting a folder of invoices, pulling figures from a stack of PDFs into one spreadsheet), that's Cowork. It's on by default for Team plans, and your owner manages it in Organization settings > Cowork. Because it can take actions, Anthropic advises keeping it away from sensitive files and watching what it does. It has its own course: [Cowork: Hand Off a Job](/courses/cowork-hand-off-a-job).

• Make one Doc or one Slides deck from real material in your own work this week. Have a second person check it before it's used.
• Share it inside the organization only.
• If your owner has added a connector, connect it with your own sign-in and use it for one specific, read-only task.
• Owner only: decide whether Dashboards fits your business yet, and write the answer on the Team Setup Checklist.

Check it worked

• You made one real document, deck or design, and a second person checked its facts.
• Nothing has been shared by public link without the owner's OK.
• Any connector you use is connected with your own sign-in, and you know what it can and can't do.
• Your team knows Dashboards is in beta and isn't the source of truth for money.

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Next: the bill. Seats, usage, spend limits, and the API credits your plan already includes.

→ Lesson 6: Costs, seats and the monthly API credits

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