Claude Cowork Setup Class (Mac & PC) — Live or Recorded

Claude Cowork turns your desktop into a real workspace for Anthropic's Claude. It reads and writes files in a folder you choose, shows you every change before saving, and lets you finally clean up the spreadsheets, proposals, and price books that have been waiting on you for months. The catch is that the install has just enough sharp edges to make owners give up on day one.

This class is built around Cowork specifically. We install it together, fix the permission prompts that silently break first-time users, and finish your first real document or spreadsheet task before the call ends.

Cowork is the right starting point if your bottleneck is documents and back-office work, not code. That covers most owners we meet: messy customer lists, proposal libraries nobody has compared in a year, intake forms that need standardizing, an old website folder that needs a clean-up pass.

If your real day is shell scripts, repo refactors, or running automated tasks unattended, the Codex setup class is the better pick. Not sure? Compare them side by side.

You pick the first task before the class. We do not run demos. The point of the session is that something real on your machine works at the end of it. Common picks from past sessions:

• Combine three messy customer-list spreadsheets into one deduped CSV with consistent columns.
• Compare five years of proposals on price, scope, and timeline into a single table.
• Rewrite a stack of service descriptions in plain English for a homeowner audience.
• Standardize an intake folder so every PDF has the same name pattern and metadata.

We help you scope the task so it finishes inside the two hours. Anything bigger becomes your second task at home.

On macOS the most common failure is the second permission prompt. Cowork asks for folder access once on first launch, then macOS asks again the first time it tries to actually write a file. Miss that second prompt and you get a silent failure that looks like Cowork is broken. We walk it live.

On Windows, SmartScreen and User Account Control are the friction points. We click through them on screen so you see exactly what is normal and what is a real problem. If your laptop is managed by an IT team, we will help you write a short request your admin can approve before the next session.

You get the recording, the checklist, and a folder template you can copy for your next project. If you want a workflow expert to look at how you should be using Cowork week to week, book a free AI Readiness Consult. If you would rather have us run a workflow end-to-end for you, that is our managed service.

If you would rather walk the install yourself for free first, the how-to-set-up-Claude-Cowork guide is the written companion to this class. Many owners read it, get stuck on one step, and then join the live session to finish.

Free written guide: How to set up Claude Cowork on Mac & PC.

Considering the other tool? Codex setup class or compare Cowork and Codex.

The general class: AI Setup Class overview.