4 min readUpdated Sep 25, 2026Beginner
File Uploads
Learn File Uploads in Claude A-Z through a practical workflow, a realistic example, common limitations, and a verification checklist you can reuse.
Claude features an industry-leading 200,000-token context window — equivalent to roughly 150,000 words or a 500-page book. This makes Claude exceptionally powerful for reading, analyzing, comparing, and summarizing large documents.
- Documents: PDF, Word (.docx), Rich Text (.rtf), Plain Text (.txt), Markdown (.md)
- Data Files: CSV, Excel (.xlsx), JSON, TSV, XML
- Code Files: JavaScript (.js, .jsx), TypeScript (.ts, .tsx), Python (.py), HTML, CSS, SQL, Go, Rust
- Images: PNG, JPEG, WEBP, GIF (for visual analysis, UI evaluation, and chart extraction)
- Ask targeted questions: Instead of 'summarize this 100-page PDF', ask 'extract the 5 main financial risks and list them with page references'.
- Cross-document comparison: Upload two competing contract versions or financial statements and ask Claude to highlight all differences in a comparison matrix.
- Extract structured data: Ask Claude to convert unstructured tables inside scanned PDFs into clean, copyable CSV or JSON format.
For documents you reference repeatedly across multiple days, add them to a Project Knowledge repository rather than re-uploading them in every new chat.
Tools for the next step
These links are selected from this page's topic, not from a generic popularity list.
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