By Shannon Glennon, AI Technology Transformation Specialist, Syracuse University ITS
Claude can do a lot more than answer questions and write first drafts. If you haven’t explored beyond the basics yet, you’re leaving some of the most useful functionality on the table. Here are five features worth trying.
Claude Can Remember Things
Claude has a memory feature that learns your preferences, role and context over time—so every conversation isn’t starting from scratch. Once it knows you’re a faculty member who writes in AP Style or a staff member who manages event logistics, it factors that in automatically.
Try it: Open a new chat and tell Claude your role, your typical audience, and one formatting preference. Then ask it to “add to memory” for future conversations.
You Can Upload Files and Actually Do Something With Them
Claude can read your documents—syllabi, reports, meeting notes, data files—and then do real work with them. Summarize, extract key points, reformat or generate a follow-up action list. It goes well beyond just “uploading a PDF”.
Try it: Upload a meeting agenda or report and ask: “Summarize the key decisions and draft a list of action items with owner names.”
Claude Can Browse the Web
A common assumption is that AI tools are frozen in time. Claude’s web search feature changes that. It can look up current information, pull from live pages and help you research topics that need up-to-date data—not just what was true two years ago.
Try it: Ask Claude to search for recent articles on a topic relevant to your work and summarize what’s new in the past six months.
You Can Give Claude a Role
Assigning Claude a persona dramatically improves what it produces. When you tell Claude to act as an instructional designer, a skeptical editor or an HR professional, it shifts its entire approach to match that lens.
Try it: Start your next prompt with “You are a plain-language editor reviewing this for a non-technical audience”—then paste in something you’ve written.
Claude Can Write Code—Even If You Can’t
You don’t have to be a developer to benefit from this one. Claude can generate Excel formulas, build simple data trackers, clean up messy spreadsheet data or automate small repetitive tasks—all from a plain-English description of what you need.
Try it: Describe a repetitive task you do in Excel and ask Claude to write a formula or script to handle it.
You don’t have to use all five at once—start with the one that sounds most useful and go from there. The features that make the biggest difference are often the ones hiding in plain sight, and chances are it won’t be the last new thing you discover!