10 Hacks Every Claude User Should Know - Lifehacker

Claude is one of the AI platforms at the forefront of the generative AI revolution: It has become the go-to AI of choice for many coders, and is leading the push into agentic AI that can take actions for users, too. It's also really simple to use, and even opens up with a warm and familiar greeting ("back at it" when I last loaded it). However you use Claude, there are also numerous features and tools worth knowing about that can help you dive deeper into the AI's capabilities. Whether it's getting Claude to rummage through your emails, adjusting the style that Claude responds in, or putting Claude to work in your web browser, there is plenty to explore outside of the core prompt box.

Connect Claude to Gmail to help manage your inbox

Connectors enable Claude to attach itself to other apps, and there are a lot of them, including Spotify, Canva, Tripadvisor, and Uber. You can add a new connector to Claude by clicking on the + (plus) button in the lower left corner of the prompt box, then choosing Connectors > Add connector.

The Gmail connector is particularly useful. If you give Claude permission to access your inbox, the AI can carry out tasks like summarizing your daily messages, or identifying emails that need responding to. You could try "which email sender do I leave unread the most in my Gmail account?" for example, or "find emails in Gmail over the last 30 days that look as if they needed a response."

Use Claude to create interactive visualizations to boost learning

Claude can't generate AI images in the same way that ChatGPT and Gemini can, but it is able to produce diagrams, charts, and visualizations, and make them interactive. One of the best ways to make use of this is when you're learning about something: You could get Claude to make an interactive diagram of a volcano, for example, or a timeline of the music of the 1990s you can scroll through.

A prompt like "create an interactive visualization for me explaining how sound waves work" will show off what Claude can do. You'll get a simple animation in return showing how sound waves work, and sliders for adjusting the frequency and amplitude of the sound waves so you can see the differences it makes.

Craft your prompts to make sure Claude checks its sources

Claude usually does a good job of pulling up and synthesizing information from the web—you can make sure it searches online by clicking the + button in the prompt box, then "Web search"—but it doesn't always have a full idea about the sources that it's looking at.

A little prompt hacking can help here. If you're searching the web, specify that Claude should focus mainly on the most up-to-date information, from the most reputable website publishers (you can specify these, if you want). Adding a note to avoid rumor and speculation is also a good idea, and should mean Claude's responses are more reliable. Claude will embed web links in its answers for reference, so you can check if it did what it was told to.

Specify styles to customize Claude's responses

Click the + button in the corner of the prompt box, then select Use style, and you'll see there are several different styles that you can get Claude to respond in: Learning, Concise, Explanatory, and Formal. There's also a Create & edit styles option for adding your own. You might want to create a style that gets Claude to reply with short, sharp, and to-the-point answers, or a style where Claude uses very simple language to explain complex topics. You could even set up a style where Claude talks like a pirate, if you want to.

Use Claude's "skills" to help complete specific jobs

Skills are another feature in Claude that can make a substantial difference to how much you get out of the AI. They're essentially sets of instructions that you can call on when needed—saving you from having to type out the instructions each time.

For example, you can use a skill to guide the tone and complexity of language to use when writing responses, or add instructions for how meeting notes should be reformatted and summarized—with specific headings or section lengths. A custom dictionary is another useful skill, where Claude can save definitions and bring them back again when needed.

Skills can be quite advanced and involve coding, but the easiest way to get started is to click the + button in the prompt box, then choose Skills > Add skill. You'll see there's actually a skill creator you can use, which lets you build skills through natural language prompts.

Stop Claude from training on your conversations

This one isn't about getting Claude to do something, but about stopping it, instead—specifically, blocking Claude from using your prompts to train its AI models. Click your user account name (lower left), then choose Settings > Privacy, and disable the feature labeled Help improve Claude. That way, you'll know your conversations are only used for your own purposes—not helping Anthropic improve its models.

Create Claude chat links to make the experience a bit more collaborative

Look up in the top right corner of any chat, and you'll a Share button. Click this, and you can create a public link for the chat that you can send to other people, or even post to the web. It's a read-only share though, so it's for disseminating information rather than collaborating on ideas. Anything you add to the conversation after you've shared it won't show up on the shared link, though it will if you unshare a chat and then share it again. As such, resharing links can make the experience a bit more collaborative: If others have input, you can ask Claude, allow it to respond, then reshare the chat link again. To manage the chats you've shared with the wider world, click your account name (lower left), then Settings > Privacy and Manage next to Shared chats.

Use Claude to create an Excel file to help you with monthly budgeting

Claude is able to create Word and Excel files from a single prompt, so you can get it to build a report on the state of the semiconductor industry or a chart showing off the achievements of your favorite sports team in just a few minutes. You can use this feature to create templates that you can fill out when needed. For example, ask Claude to "create an Excel file for family financial planning, with room to enter basic incomings and outgoings," and you get a fully formatted spreadsheet that you can then update.

Use Claude's browser extension to find the best hotel for a trip

Claude has a browser extension that you can install in Chrome or any Chromium-based browser (such as Microsoft Edge). You can then give it tasks for navigating websites, filling out forms, extracting data, and so on. The add-on will ask for approval for major actions, like making a purchase, and you can get it to ask for approval for every action by selecting Ask before acting in the prompt box that pops up when you launch the extension.

There's a lot the Claude extension can do. One helpful task the bot can carry out is looking at a list of hotels on a website and deciding which is the best fit for you, based on the criteria you give it (price, what the AI already knows about you, and any other information you want to add).

Switch to incognito mode to chat with Claude privately

Sometimes you might not want your chats with Claude to be on the record, to remove any trace of them existing, and to stop Claude from referring back to them in the future. When you start a new chat, click the little ghost icon up in the top right corner to go incognito. To go back to normal, click the X in the top right corner. Your incognito chats are not used for training, but are retained by Anthropic for 30 days before being deleted.