You released it at just the right time for me. When I saw your announcement, I had two tasks that I was about to start working on: revising and expanding a project proposal in .docx format and adapting some slides (.pptx) from a past presentation for different audience.

I created a folder for Cowork, copied a couple of hundred files into it related to the two tasks, and told Claude to prepare a comprehensive summary in markdown format of that work (and some information about me) for its future reference.

The summary looked good, so I then described the two tasks to Claude and told it to start working.

Its project proposal revision was just about perfect. It took me only about 10 more minutes to polish it further and send it off.

The slides took more time to fix. The text content of some additional slides that Claude created was quite good and I ended up using most of it, but the formatting did not match the previous slides and I had to futz with it a while to make it consistent. Also, one slide it created used a screenshot it took using Chrome from a website I have built; the screenshot didn’t illustrate what it was supposed to very well, so I substituted a couple of different screenshots that I took myself. That job is now out the door, too.

I had not been looking forward to either of those two tasks, so it’s a relief to get them done more quickly than I had expected.

One initial problem: A few minutes into my first session with Claude in Cowork, after I had updated the app, it started throwing API errors and refusing to respond. I used the "Clear Cache and Restart" from the Troubleshooting menu and started over again from the start. Since then there have been no problems.