Hands-on tests of Anthropic's tools: Claude, Claude Code and skills. Each guide shows the setup, the real output and the limits we hit, so you can judge whether it fits your work.
26 guides
Claude
Claude Code 2.1.302 turns fork subagents on by default in claude -p and the Agent SDK. In 12 runs of the same task, forks cost about 36% less and finished 5 seconds sooner, but Claude only used them when asked.
Claude
One prompt turned a sample sales CSV into a filterable Claude dashboard in about 4.5 minutes. Every figure matched our own calculation, but it doesn't refresh when the file changes.
Claude
We installed Anthropic's Claude for Excel add-in on Excel for the web and ran four tasks on a sample sheet: error hunt, fixes, a live what-if and a VBA macro request.
Claude
One Claude Code prompt read three PDF invoices, built an Excel register with formula check columns, and flagged the invoice whose total was off by 100,000, in about a minute.
Claude
One Claude Code prompt merged four branch Excel files, caught the one with reordered and renamed columns, and built a SUMIFS summary in about a minute. Plus the check you still need.
Claude
On Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans, Claude Code's /usage breaks down what counts against your limits: long context, subagents, MCP servers, all-day sessions. We ran it on Claude Code 2.1.301 and show what to cut.
Claude
We installed five popular Claude skills in Claude Code and ran each on a real task. grill-me and the pptx skill changed the result most; xlsx was already built in; frontend-design waited to be named.
Claude
The grill-me skill makes Claude interview you in rounds before it writes anything. How to install it in Claude Code, answer fast, and what a real run produced: a 317-line plan in under 6 minutes.
Claude
We gave Claude Code the same café landing-page prompt three times. With the frontend-design skill installed, Claude ignored it; only naming the skill changed the design.
Claude
We asked Claude Code to build an Excel report with formulas and a chart, then add a new month, with nothing installed and with Anthropic's document-skills. The built-in xlsx skill did the job.
Claude
We used skill-creator to build a custom Claude skill that turns messy meeting notes into Word minutes. It wrote a 106-line SKILL.md in about 1 minute 15 seconds, then triggered on its own.
Claude
Claude skills are instruction folders Claude loads when a task matches. We installed Anthropic's skills from GitHub in Claude Code and had the pptx skill build a 6-slide deck with a native chart in about 2 minutes 10 seconds.
