Usability is not a strong point in generative AI tools. Claude is there with the worst of them, but it’s worth persevering.
We all know that person. Ask if they want a cup of tea, and it turns out they must have a particular brand of peppermint leaf tea, served in a bone china cup and saucer with one small teaspoon of sugar and (if you could) a slice of fresh lemon.
You on the other hand are having a Five Roses teabag, in a mug, with some milk. Any strength, as long as it is hot.
In the world of generative AI, ChatGPT and Gemini are the Five Roses people. Claude is the peppermint tea person.
I know that this is the case because colleague Anne Taylor and I have recently had to up our Claude game considerably in order to train a group of people how to use it in their working lives.
The request to run training in Claude came after a discussion with the client about various generative AI tools, trying to answer the question of which tool is best. The answer is that irritating one: “it depends”. Some AI tools are better than others at different tasks, and that will vary over time.
To meet that training need, I paid for a monthly subscription (about R380 a month) and, with Anne, learned my way round Claude’s not-so-obvious quirks. Along the way, we also discovered the thing it is really useful for.
First up: why should you bother with Claude?
At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason to jump ship to Claude. Just like its competitors, Claude has a prominent field into which you can type your query: help me write this email, or help me write this report, or (perhaps) help me batch-prep a set of recipes for frozen meals I can take to my neighbour who is having a hard time.
The chat interface of Claude operates in the same way that ChatGPT or Gemini do: it will give you an answer to that query. The style and tone of the answer will vary according to which tool you are using but not wildly.
If all you are doing with AI is this kind of question-and-answer, I’d say there’s no reason to switch from ChatGPT or Gemini (unless you want to have a go in the spirit of play, which is always a good idea).
We also learned that it’s a waste of time and energy-sapping compute power to ask Claude to generate images – it just isn’t any good at it.
There is one thing that Claude is good at: spreadsheets. If that’s something you use in your work, then it’s worth exploring Claude. The user interface takes some getting used to, though. In the hope of demystifying it all, here’s what I’ve learned.
Things you need to know about Claude
In no particular order, these were the things I needed to get my head around as I explored the tool’s less-than-wonderful user interface:
ONE: There’s a web browser version of Claude, and there’s also a desktop app. Gemini doesn’t have a desktop app; ChatGPT does have one but it is essentially the same as the web browser. In Claude, however, the browser version and the app offer different functions. The web browser gives you a range of functions including chat, projects and artifacts (more on that later). The app has those things, but it also offers Code, Cowork and Design (more on those later).
TWO: On my browser at least, Claude opens with the sidebar collapsed. You need to click an icon in the top left-hand corner to open the sidebar and see in words what the various icons actually do, or hover over them.
THREE: If you want Claude to search the web, you need to turn that on (click on the + sign in the chat field and select it in the dropdown menu). You have to do this in ChatGPT too (Gemini has it turned on by default). If you don’t turn on search, both Claude and ChatGPT will rely on their training data (at the time of writing this, the cutoff date for both tools was August 2025.)
FOUR: All three of the major GenAI tools offer a way of working that goes beyond basic chat: essentially you are able to group chats by theme or category, so that you work within a framework that is wider that just that one chat. In Claude these are called projects, and you can upload files and write instructions relevant to your work and which govern the tool’s answers inside the project. I, for instance, have a project for marketing my business into which I have uploaded all my social media analytics. ChatGPT also has projects (with some differences from Claude) and Gemini doesn’t have them (but the recent integration of NotebookLM means you can use your notebooks as projects).
FIVE: Beyond these two main ways of using a GenAI tool, there’s a way to scale up a bit. ChatGPT has a thing called a CustomGPT (only on paid plans) and Google’s Gemini offers Gems. Claude, on the other hand, does this in the aforementioned projects function. In all of these, the key thing is the writing of a set of system instructions that guide how this tool works over time.
SIX: Now we go the the Claude-specific things that I am still in the process of learning:
Artifacts – I’ve never properly got a handle on what these are for, but it appears that Claude will create one when it thinks you need it, and it will be a document or a piece of code that you can then work with, in collaboration with the AI tool.
Cowork (in the sidebar, but you can only use it in the app, where it is one of three tabs in the top left hand corner) – this is where you create automations. For example, you might want Claude to generate invoices based on a spreadsheet, ready for you to email them to a client.
Code (like Cowork, in the sidebar but actually only usable in the app) – a place to write code.
Design (in the sidebar of the browser, opens a new tab) – a place to upload your brand guidelines and then build presentations or even apps (or so I surmise; I confess that I have not yet tried it).
Skills (hit the Customize link in the sidebar) – you can work with Claude to have it build a skillset that can be applied to your chats or projects. You might for instance build a skill based on your own marketing info which takes blog posts and suggests LinkedIn posts.
For general users, I’d say you can just ignore all of these.
Now, to that spreadsheet thing
I said at the outset that Claude is good at spreadsheets. These are the things I have had it do:
- I needed a spreadsheet with messy data in it for a training demo. Given some very broad product info on a web page, Claude generated an Excel spreadsheet with 100 lines of data.
- I asked Claude to make a clean version of that messy spreadsheet, which it did with ease. (It generated the spreadsheet in a separate window and offered a download or add to Google Drive option). Working in a project, I was able to have Claude generate summaries of the data, in text and table form. Spot checks revealed Claude’s work with figures to be accurate.
- I haven’t tried it, but trainees have told me that they can ask Claude to find anomalies in a spreadsheet, or to help them with Excel formulas.
My own use of spreadsheets is somewhat limited but if they form the bulk of your work, I’d say it’s definitely worth going on a Claude learning curve. You could look out for webinars on the topic, or take a course. Or you could ask Claude to design you a training course. Your prompt might look something like this:
Design a learning programme for Claude. Assume knowledge of the chat interface. The aim is to be able to use Projects to work with spreadsheets. Assume that there is no specific workflow in mind. The programme should contain assignments and tasks to aid learning. The assignments need to contain step by step instructions – assume there is no real knowledge of how these things work. The programme should take two weeks, and be doable in 30 minutes each weekday.
As far as I know, the free version should generate you a decent training guide (though it might not be perfect in every detail). And you can build five projects in the free version.
Final word
Claude feels like almost all generative AI tools: they were made for the simple chat function at the outset, and then other functions were bolted on later. Claude represents a particularly finicky version of those usability issues. It’s worth persevering though if you need help with spreadsheets: this is truly Claude’s superpower.
Main picture: Solen Feyissa, Unsplash
Previous Sensible Guide articles
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The AI tool everybody should be using – NotebookLM – Research assistant and note-taker rolled into one – allow me to introduce you to NotebookLM.
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