Things You Never Knew Claude Could Do: 40 Hidden Claude AI Features & Tips (PDF)

Claude will read your handwriting.

Not a typed note. A photograph of a notebook page, a whiteboard, a recipe card in somebody's grandmother's writing. It transcribes it, marks the words it could not make out, and then works with what it found.

Almost nobody knows that, because nothing in the app mentions it. The chat box is one door into a much larger building, and there is no menu listing the other rooms. So most people find three or four things by accident and use those for a year.

This is the list nobody hands you.

Forty capabilities, each one with the exact prompt or the exact steps. It reads the charts inside a PDF, not just the words. It builds a working calculator you can use on the spot, rather than instructions for building one. It produces a real spreadsheet file with live formulas in it. It turns your itinerary into a calendar file that adds every event at once. It runs actual code to get a total right instead of estimating one that looks right.

WHAT IS INSIDE

Part One. What Claude can see. Seven things to put in front of it that most people never try. The pictures inside a PDF and the page-count threshold where they stop being visible. Handwriting. A screenshot of a table turned back into a spreadsheet. An official letter explained in four lines. Two versions of a document with only the real changes listed.

Part Two. What Claude can make. Working tools rather than descriptions of tools, and the fact that you can publish one as a link for someone else to use. Real spreadsheet, document and PDF downloads. Diagrams. Why Claude cannot make images is true and still leaves you plenty of artwork. Calendar files. Pages that are genuinely ready to print.

Part Three. Claude doing the actual work. The one line that stops it estimating a number. Cleaning a messy export. Searching with sources, and the setting that has to be on first. Finding a file when you cannot remember its name. The version of Claude built for work that is not coding, and the two places Claude lives that are not the chat window at all.

Part Four. Claude shaped to you. The settings field that improves every answer you will ever get. Memory between conversations. Searching your own past chats. Teaching it a procedure once. Getting it to write its own instructions from a conversation that went well. Why telling it what not to do works better than telling it what to do.

Part Five. The controls on the conversation. Editing an earlier message to take a different path instead of starting over. Turning up how hard it thinks. Talking instead of typing. Switching the formatting off. Making it answer only from what you gave it. Asking how sure it actually is.

Part Six. Uses nobody thinks to try. Rehearsing a conversation you are dreading, with Claude playing the other person properly. Making it argue your plan has already failed. Being tested instead of told. Being interviewed until the thing comes out of your head. Marking work against your own rubric, then marking the marking. And the reframe that turns one answer into a checklist you keep.

Then a page called What Claude still cannot do, with eight honest limits, because a guide that only tells you what something can do is not much use for planning your week.

THE PART THAT MATTERS MOST

Every entry in here had to be real and had to actually work. Several genuinely surprising things were cut during fact-checking because they turned out to be renamed, folded into something else, or never true in the first place. Where a capability depends on your plan or on whether you are in the browser, the desktop app or the phone app, the entry says so on the page rather than in small print at the back.

WHO IT IS FOR

Anyone already using Claude who suspects they are getting a fraction of it. No code, no jargon, and nothing that assumes you know what a token is. If you use Claude daily, Part Three alone will show you something you have been paying for and not using.

FORMAT

34 pages, A4, print-ready PDF. 40 numbered entries, each with what it does, why nobody realises, the exact prompt, and what a working result looks like. Designed to be read on a screen or printed and kept beside you. Instant digital download, yours to keep, no subscription.

THE HONEST BIT

Claude changes. A few things in here appear only on certain plans or in certain places, and the guide says so where it matters. If something has moved by the time you read it, that is the tool changing rather than the entry having been wrong when it was written.

Independent guide. Claude is a trademark of its owner. This product is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Anthropic. Instant digital download, so all sales are final once the file has been downloaded.

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