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How to Summarize a PDF with Claude (Contracts, Reports and Long Documents)

Press + to attach the PDF, tell Claude who the summary is for and what decision it supports, and ask for the key points with page numbers. Per Anthropic’s Help Center, Claude reads both text and images in PDFs of up to 100 pages, and text only in longer ones, up to 1,000 pages.

By Published Last updated 2 min read

The short version

Claude handles long documents well, so the main job is telling it what you need from them. A summary “for a landlord deciding whether to renew” is useful; a summary “of this document” usually isn’t.

Step by step

  1. Press + and attach the PDF. Up to 20 files per chat, per Anthropic’s Help Center.
  2. Say who it’s for and what decision it supports.
  3. Ask for specific things: costs, dates, obligations, risks, open questions.
  4. Ask for page numbers next to each point, so you can check quickly.
  5. Ask follow-up questions in the same chat: “What does clause 12 mean in plain English?”
  6. Check the important points against the document.

Prompts to copy

A contract:

text
I'm a small business owner deciding whether to sign the attached agreement.
List every payment and its due date, what I must do, how to cancel, any automatic renewal or price increase,
and anything unusual compared with a typical agreement of this kind. Page or section for each.
Then give me 3 questions to ask before signing.

A report with charts:

text
Summarize the attached report for our board in one page: the 5 key findings with the page each comes from,
what the charts show, and any conclusion the data doesn't clearly support.

Several documents at once:

text
I've attached three supplier quotes. Compare them in a table: price, what's included, delivery time,
payment terms, and anything missing. Then tell me which questions I should ask each supplier.

What Claude can read

Per Anthropic’s Help Center: PDF, Word (DOCX), CSV, TXT, HTML, ODT, RTF, EPUB, JSON and Excel (XLSX, which needs code execution turned on), plus images. For PDFs of up to 100 pages, Claude reads text and visuals; from 101 to 1,000 pages, text only; larger PDFs can’t be uploaded.

Mistakes to avoid

  • Not saying what you need. Generic summaries miss what matters to you.
  • Skipping page numbers. They turn checking from an hour into ten minutes.
  • Trusting figures from long PDFs’ charts. Above 100 pages, Claude reads text only.
  • Uploading confidential files carelessly. See keep your data private in Claude.

When not to use it

Don’t sign or file anything legally binding based only on a summary. Use it to know what to read closely and what to ask your lawyer or accountant.

Related: analyze a spreadsheet with Claude.

Frequently asked questions

What files can Claude read?

According to Anthropic's Help Center: PDF, DOCX, CSV, TXT, HTML, ODT, RTF, EPUB, JSON and XLSX, plus JPEG, PNG, GIF and WebP images. Up to 20 files per chat, up to 500 MB each.

Can Claude read the charts and tables in my PDF?

For PDFs of 100 pages or fewer, Anthropic says Claude analyzes both the text and the visual elements. For longer PDFs it reads the text only, so check figures that come from charts.

Sources

  1. Claude Help Center: what kinds of documents can I upload?

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