How to Analyze PDFs and Long Documents with Claude

0:00Claude could read and summarize a 20-page report in less time than it takes you to just read the opening paragraph. But most people that even use this option, they upload a PDF to Claude, they ask for a summary, and they stop there. But once you do get that summary, that's really just the beginning. Claude could do a lot with

0:17your document once you give it access. So, in this one video, I'm going to show you exactly how to upload and analyze a long PDF with Claude for your work. And I'm going to start here with a simple three-part formula that gets you a summary that you could actually use and utilize. And then I'll pull every action item out of the report and turn it into a spreadsheet for my team. I'm going to also have Claude check a contract before I sign it, and I'll show you different prompts for that. And I'll show you how to keep long documents in a project so you never have to upload it twice, and

0:50you could continue to talk to it inside of Claude. And I do have a paid Claude subscription, but everything I'm about to show you in this video is going to be available in the free plan. It just limits you on how often you could do this inside the free plan. And if you want to get the most out of Claude, there's a free guide I want to show you

1:06here that I put together with my team. It's called Claude at Work, and it pretty much covers everything you could do with Claude, including tons of different prompts you could simply copy and paste from this guide. It has a section on projects, so I'm going to touch up on projects in this video, but this goes much deeper on projects. It has an entire section on Claude's skills. These are the most useful part of Claude, probably, because you could

1:26teach Claude how to do different things. You can make 40, 50, 60 different skills in Claude for pretty much everything you do, and it'll pull it into chat when he needs it. So, this and pretty much everything else relating to Claude is included in this guide, and it's completely free to access. So, I'll put a link in the description, and I'll put a QR code here on screen, too. Okay, so the first thing I want to show you is right inside of the Claude website. You

1:48could do this with the Claude app, too. But right now in the Claude website, if you press the plus sign here, you could upload or add files directly from your computer into Claude. You could also drag and drop it into this box, too. So, you don't always have to press the plus sign. And later, we're going to look at projects here because with projects, you can actually upload it one time, and then every new chat will have access to it ongoing. So, if I press the upload here, you could upload it directly from your computer. Now, Claude has added a ton of other things like you could also

2:19connect this to your Google Drive and just bring it from Google Drive without downloading and uploading it. But for this video, I do have this on my computer. This is a 22-page report, and I'm just going to upload it. And with it uploaded here, I just need to type in a prompt for it to know what to do with this document. If you just press enter, it will do some things. It typically summarizes it. But usually, you want to

2:41give it a prompt here. And I use a simple formula for a prompt. I usually start with who, why, and how. Who are you? Why are you reading this document? And how do you want an answer back from Claude? So, I'll show you with this prompt right here. So, I give it some context about who I am. I'm just doing a fictional company over here. So, that's the who. And then this is the why right here. I kind of told it why I'm trying to analyze this document. And then right here at the end, this is the format I want back. And then give me five things that I should pay the most

3:14attention to. So, I'm going to send this out over here. And in a few seconds here, I got my short version that shows up over here. And the five things that I should focus on for my upcoming meeting, it gave that to me in a numbered list. Now, one thing I want to point out, if you're new to Claude, Claude has different modes on how it works. So, depending on your accounts, if you click down here, and you go to effort, this is the amount of effort Claude puts in into analyzing and thinking in the background. So, I have mine set to extra for things that have numbers in it, or

3:49they're in the longer side like this PDF here. But typically, you will just have it on medium if this is allowed on your account. So, for more complicated things, I will just change the effort, but it will add more time. But if you're not in a rush and you want the best results, typically extra gets you pretty good stuff. Max really uses your cloud credits very quickly, so I almost never use it. Now, if I read through this and something doesn't make sense, well, you're inside of Claude. You could have a follow-up and it still has access to that document. It still has access to its answers. So, this is my follow-up

4:21prompt to explain the callback rate to make it a little bit simpler for me to understand, and it gave me that answer pretty quickly here. And I should mention, even if you upload a 100-page document, what Claude could do is actually even look into the charts and the images and things like that. It really you have to be over a thousand pages where it really mostly relies on text. And you can upload a thousand-page document to Claude, too. But typically, things like this are 20 pages, 50 pages, sometimes 100 pages maybe for an annual report. For this next demo, I'm going to show you how to get Claude to actually

4:53create files for you after it analyzes the file that you give it. So, I'm going to go down here, and I'm going to go to my settings menu. And you got to go to capabilities here, and you just have to make sure if you scroll down here that code execution is turned on here. So, it could actually create different type of files for you when this is turned on. A lot of accounts already have this turned on, but I just wanted to point this out cuz if this is not on, you won't be able to create. And I started a new chat here, but you can do this in a follow-up

5:21of a previous chat. In this case, I'm using the same PDF, but I told it to go through this report and pull out every action item. And then for each one, tell me what needs to be done, who is responsible if the report says so, and then who's responsible and the deadline. So, I'm going to send this out, but I'm going to show you in a follow-up prompt

5:38how to turn this into something else. Okay, so it gave me the action items here in this table format. It told me who is responsible, and you could see it already gave me, without a follow-up prompt, but I'm going to show you the follow-up prompt, an option to create a spreadsheet. Now, Claude actually has a spreadsheet creator built in, but you could always create Excel documents out of Claude 2. So, this is extra because it already decided to do that even though I didn't ask it, but typically if it didn't do this, I would ask it to put it in columns here in table format with

6:07all the different things I'm looking for. And then I'm going to say, "Turn this table into an Excel file I could share with my team." Or, if you do get this option to create a spreadsheet, you could just click that, too. You don't even have to create a prompt to get that. Okay, just like that, it's created this Excel document for me. You could click download here to download it to your computer, but it is also available to look at. This is something called artifact where it lets you look at what it's created for you. Here, you could send it to Google Drive from here as

6:36well, but it created exactly what I asked for after it analyzed the document in a follow-up here. And look how nicely formatted this is. And you could with chat ask to make any revision you want to it. Now, next I want to show you how to actually analyze a contract here before you sign it. This is probably one of the most useful things I do with Claude if it doesn't require a lawyer and if something simple that I could do myself. Okay, so here's the contract here. You could see a lot of different pages, a lot of legal jargons. I uploaded it here, and my prompt again

7:08tells it who I am here. And as you use Claude more and more, especially if you're not new to it, it really doesn't need that initial information because it has memory, so it really learns who you are over time. But, I typically like to share that just in case you are new to using Claude here. And then I just ask it to review and give me any risks, unusual terms, missing information before I sign it. And it explain each

7:32one in plain English, not legal jargon. Okay, it's going to give you a warning here that it's not a lawyer, obviously, but it's going to tell you the biggest risks, so it lists them all over here. The terms that lean towards the person sending me this contract here, so I could read through that. And any missing and unclear information is listed like that. But it's typically like a page or two worth of information, and that was a pretty long document here. But I'm going to do a follow-up prompt here. If I cancel after 12 months, would I owe anything? And then it's going to refer back to the document. This is something

8:03that it didn't really tell me up front, but you are in chat. You could ask it as much as you want, as many questions as you want here. And he's telling me that I will owe $11,000 termination fee. Now, for this next demo, I want to show you a better workflow than what I've been showing you, and that's by using project. So, if you press this here, you could actually create new projects from here. And projects are basically, if you think of them as a folder in your Claude account that has access to all the different PDFs. So, especially if you have more than one thing you want to compare, two

8:32different contracts, you want to compare 10 different documents, you should create a project. So, I'm going to press this. I'm going to give it a name here. You can tell it want to achieve, but you don't have to. I'm going to create that. And now I'm technically in the project, but I want to show you where that ends up, cuz if you go over here, you can see all your projects from this tab. And

8:49this one, you could see I started here. So, if I go to it here, it actually looks a little bit different. So, this is the page I want to show you. Because here with projects, you could give it context. If I press add, I could upload from my own computer here, files or entire folder. I could type in text, or I could get things from Google Drive and

9:08other things I've given a connection to. But in this case, I'm just going to upload from my computer. And I actually gave it two different documents here. So, I gave it two different contracts, so I could compare them. But you could see I've only used 1% of this project's capacity here. So, you could add dozens and dozens of different documents of all different file formats, and it will always be able to access that. And you could always add more anytime you want,

9:32or remove any ones you no longer need. So now, if I start a new chat in this project, I don't have to press plus sign and upload anything. And any continual chat that I'm having in this project will just always have access to the context of this project, which are those files. So, I'm going to go ahead and send this out. It's going to go and sift through whatever documents I have in the context of that project and it's going to read through it and give me an answer

9:56pretty quickly. Okay, I got my analysis. My follow-up is going to ask them to negotiate this contract for me. So, it's going to draft a short email asking them if they would match a different price here. And here's our follow-up email. We could copy it or open it in our mail app and send it out. Now, anytime you go back to that project, you'll see any previous chat, but you could start a new chat and you will always be able to pull

10:18in from the context of this project. Now, one more free resource I have, especially if you're trying to learn the top AI tools, is this platform right here. This is called Futurepedia. This is our platform and we've been actually reinventing it in the last 6 months, so it's a lot better than what it used to be. So, this is going to give you personalized guidance to help you use AI at work. And the way that works is you simply create a free account, answer about five questions, and then it will give you this dashboard here. And what this dashboard shows you is it will show

10:49you exactly how to get started with AI. First, it shows you a toolkit. So, this is for example my toolkit. These are some of the AI tools that I use myself. You could create your own toolkit. And then it shows you different use cases and different workflows for your role. So, just to show you, if I go to the workflow tab, I put founder as my role here and these are the different

11:10workflows that it's recommending for me. And it also recommends different use cases. So, these are going to have an exact prompt you could copy and paste into Claude or your favorite AI chatbot. And it also has AI skills. It also gives you a much, much better way to find AI tools that are specific for your job and for your role here. And it also keeps you updated with the latest and greatest

11:33in the world of AI in almost real time. And this gets updated multiple times a week. We're going to give you new things every time you log into this platform, and it is completely free. This is Futurpedia. I'll also put a link along with that other resource I mentioned in the description below this video. And since I finished with Claude projects, I'd made a dedicated video all about them, so I'll put that video over here

11:54so you can watch that next.