Skills & Connectors in Cowork

Cowork becomes even more powerful when combined with Claude's ecosystem of extensions.

What Are Agent Skills?

Skills are pre-built capabilities that improve Claude's ability to handle specific tasks. In Cowork, you get access to skills for:

  • Document creation (Word, PDF, Markdown)
  • Spreadsheet manipulation (Excel, CSV)
  • Presentation building (PowerPoint)

Skills are automatically activated when relevant. You don't need to enable them manually.

Learn more about Skills →

What Are Connectors?

Connectors link Claude to external information sources. If you've set up Connectors in your regular Claude chat, they work in Cowork too.

Examples:

  • Google Drive Connector: Access files from your Drive.
  • Notion Connector: Pull data from your Notion workspace.
  • Slack Connector: Reference messages and channels.

Using Connectors in Cowork

  1. Set up Connectors in Claude Settings.
  2. In Cowork, simply reference the source: 
    "Find the meeting notes from last week in my Google Drive and summarize them."

Claude in Chrome

Claude in Chrome is a browser extension that gives Claude the ability to browse the web. When paired with Cowork, this enables:

  • Research tasks: "Find the top 10 competitors in this market and save a summary to 'research.md'."
  • Data scraping: "Go to this URL, extract the pricing table, and save it as a CSV."
  • Verification: "Check if this company's website is still active."

Enabling Chrome Integration

  1. Install the Claude for Chrome extension.
  2. Log in with your Claude account.
  3. In Cowork, Claude will automatically use Chrome when a task requires web access.

Combining Everything

The real power comes from chaining these together:

"Check my Google Drive for any invoices from last month, download them, extract the amounts, and create an expense summary spreadsheet."

Claude uses:

  1. Connectors to access Google Drive
  2. Skills to read PDFs and create Excel
  3. Cowork to write the output file locally