This use of AI sounds genuinely useful, especially the ability to connect to your email accounts to surface content for creating documents. I’d love for Apple to develop something similar.
I use Google Gemini. I’ve use it to create our charity policies. It wrote them and saved them as Google docs. Took an hour to write 14 policies. They will of course need some minor edits.
I’ve used NotebookLM to drag in our charity Model Deed (Constitution) and then query the dragged in document about changes needed. This has all been extremely helpful.
I’ve used Gemini to create an annual leave Google Sheet that calculates how much leave I have left and works out if my entered leave falls on bank holidays and takes that into account. It provided all the code for the sheet. Took about 30 min to create.
I’ve also used it to create code for my Ninox database to track my weight and show my weight loss each week. And also to create a complete new database that tracks my gym workouts.
I also use Gemini to paste in my teaching notes and rewrite them for a youth audience when I’m teaching at our youth group.
I’m just giving these to show you the capability. I’m sure others have far more complex use cases.
I hardly use a search engine anymore.
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It’s been able to do this for a while, not sure what’s different now. Maybe just got better. I use to use it as an example in our AI training course.
You can give it an existing word document and tell it to use that as a template, so it has company branding. This is better than just asking it to make something from scratch because applying whole document formatting is a pain in Word.
I noticed Clause also gained the ability to create word docs at some point in the last few weeks.
I love hearing that people find value in these new tools, but I still struggle to find anything that will be a real booster in managing my day-to-day chores through “AI”.
I just got access to CoPilot on a client’s network, and have not had time to investigate it depth yet. However, I did ask it how to perform a simple operation in Teams (creating a private list of team members). It gave me the wrong answer three times before I gave up and figured it out by myself. So, you’d think that a question about current versions of Microsoft software usage could be something CoPilot should just nail directly, but nope.
It is constantly visible somewhere with small reminders that it is there, but it seems “Summarization” and “Draft a text” are the two things it really wants me to try.
From the article:
And for responses with 600 characters or more, Copilot also includes a default export button that lets you send text directly to Word, PowerPoint, Excel, or PDF
OK, so they implemented Copy/Paste? I might try this to see how the output from a chat session is arranged and formatted in an Excel or a PowerPoint.
The use of .DOT and .DOTX template files has been a core feature of Word for 30+ years. It has been poorly maintained, IMO, and the “Styles” panels are weirdly hidden in most of the Office apps. The “New document from template” workflow has also been obscured over time.
I suspect the resources doing actual UX work are mostly gone from Microsoft. I see the same trends across their line of products - it doesn’t seem like the new releases are ever improving the UX for common, day-to-day tasks. Sure, they change things, move stuff around and often just remove or hide useful features. I can’t imagine the coders use any of these products for themselves.
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This news article was fairly interesting on AI poisoning:
It just requires you to be creative and accept it does some stuff better than others. We have an AI working gp where people bring ideas to the table that they think others would help from. We keep them in a wiki for people to share. These were ideas from the last meeting
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Get a table out of a PDF - since PDFs can be a pain to copy and paste out of, if you have a table in a PDF then tell it to extract the table and put it in an excel or word doc you can copy and paste more easily. Saves a few minutes. Particularly useful if you only need a few of the columns, or there’s lots of tables you can do in a single command.
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Write a job advert - we have a template job advert that we use at my company every time we recruit. If you attach the full job description to an AI along with the job description template, then the AI will write the job ad for you, using the format and language we prefer. Saves about 10 to 15 mins per ad, but we recruit about 50 times a year, so saves a lot in total.
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Update company policies - we have a very long prompt that we use to update our company policies. You attach the policy and basically tell it to review the policy in terms of legislation, equality, brevity and plain english, then ask it to suggest all possible changes in a table. The staff member can then review the proposed changes and approve any that are needed. Turns a 3+ hour task into a 30 minute task. We update about 50 policies per year, so this saves a tonne of time.