Working with documents

PDFs, long text, and getting the most from large context

Claude’s superpower: big context

Modern Claude models can handle extremely long documents — hundreds of pages in some cases. You can paste an entire contract, a full website audit, a year of email threads, or a 60-page strategy document and ask Claude to reason across all of it. Most people dramatically underuse this capability.

High-value document tasks

Summarization with a specific lens

Here is a 40-page vendor contract. I'm an agency owner evaluating whether to use this vendor for client projects.

Summarize the contract focusing on:
1. Payment terms and late fees
2. IP ownership of work product
3. Liability caps and indemnification
4. Termination clauses
5. Any unusual or concerning provisions

[paste contract]

Cross-document comparison

Here are proposals from two vendors for the same project. Compare them on: scope coverage, timeline, pricing, risk factors, and what each leaves ambiguous.

VENDOR A PROPOSAL: [paste]
VENDOR B PROPOSAL: [paste]

Q&A on a document

I'm going to paste our client contract template. After I paste it, I'll ask you questions about specific clauses. Ready?

[paste contract]

What does our contract say about revision rounds, and is there any ambiguity in how "revision" is defined?

Tips for large documents

• Front-load your instruction. Tell Claude what to do BEFORE pasting the document — Claude reads everything in order.
• Be specific about what to look for. “Analyze this” on a 50-page doc produces a generic summary. “Find every instance of X” produces something actionable.
• One task at a time. Ask for the summary first, then the extraction, then the comparison.