To think CoPilot is fucking useless?

[DeftGoldHedgehog]

Everything I ask it to do it would have been quicker to do myself, or it's "Sorry I can't do that, Dave."

I'm asking it to file messages in my inbox into my existing folders, to see what is in each folder I've already filed and file messages accordingly. Surely this should be an easy task and ideal for AI, especially one that is supposed to be intergrated with other apps from the same creator? Apparently it can only create rules to do this or a filing strategy and can't see the Outlook 'message identifiers' to be able to move anything.

May as well go and bash my head against a wall, it would be more productive.

It's a mixed bag for me. Today it found a duplicate item in a spreadsheet really quickly. It's good a writing formulae that I understand, but would get lost in the many brackets if I tried to write myself.

It's not great at technical questions - it often gets them wrong, which I find by checking its sources.

It's quite good at reviewing documents. But when it misses things and you ask why, it pretty much says "whoops, my bad" which doesn't get closer to being able to instruct it not to miss that stuff.

It made a PowerPoint prettier for me, but also lost quite a lot of content on the way.

It is useful for translation and also finding things in realy long documents. Though I can't tell how good at translation as I wouldn't be asking it to translate if I could do it myself.

The thing I hate is its attempts to write emails. It's obsequious. I asked it to read through my emails and learn my style, but it was still obsequious. I think it thinks I'm really rude in my emails and couldn't possibly write like me. The emails it produces sound a bit like my American colleagues, so maybe it was trained on a more American style of communication.

I hate AI ... its taking over everything!

A lot of what you get back is due to the quality of the prompt you put in.

I’m so glad I don’t have to use any of it.

We have it at work and it is a twat, even a toddler is more likely to do as told.

It’s a special kind of shite. We’re all told we HAVE to!use it and other we’ll get ‘left behind’ apparently. Emperors new clothes.

I love it. Copilot Premium is amazing and lots better than the basic one. It is genuinely making me loads more efficient at work.

I am shit at excel. Can't do formulas or any other complicated stuff. Don't need to learn excel any more as I just put the prompts into copilot and it does it all for me. Stuff that would have taken me hours to do, I can now do in 5/10 mins.

As someone who uses AI regularly for work and researches new tools, I can confirm that copilot is garbage, claude is much better.

Unpopular opinion but I feel like I’ve house trained it to do my bidding. However I am extremely precise with my prompts. It probably helps that I have a lot of previous experience instructing 5 year olds to do simple tasks, it kind of needs the same mind set .

I use the premium version all the time but I have changed how I work rather than treating it as a faster horse. For example recently instead of filing some documents from my inbox I had Copilot build a HTML dashboard and surface the most relevant ones, provide a summary with options to click through to the live docs. It took me about 15 minutes and was much more useful than how I would have done it before.

We have to use it in our school if we want to create anything with AI. It's completely rubbish compared to some others if you want to create resources. Can barely seem to manage images.

I absolutely love it, it’s fully integrated with all programmes on my work laptop and I use it for everything. I’m inclined to think those who feel differently either don’t have the right version or can’t use it properly. It really is such a time saver.

Thanks for the messages. I do need to sometimes find a different way of working. I watched a video about organising emails and promptly archived all my folders. Instead of filing everything I just archived it - can still find it if I need to. Also set up some auto archive and deletion rules.

Instead of all the folders for different subjects (must have been thirty or more) I now have three folders. For information - that's something I will read later. Read and actioned - self explanatory. There are auto archive settings for these folders. And finally To Do. These are email tasks which have been copied into the To Do app.

Spent about half an hour on this yesterday and cleared my inbox. Was in a meeting for most of today, came back to my desk, dealt with all the emails that had come in, sorted out my tasks for tomorrow and again have a completely empty inbox.

I can't tell you how much lighter I feel. At times I just dive into work creating false time pressure and just need to take a beat and organise myself a little first.

I have been using the one embedded in Microsoft 365 and it's really helpful. I use it for repetitive excel tasks within the same workbook and for reconciliations. 'Tell me which records are making this check total not be zero' saves me ages of lookups and hunting around.

Yeah at my work it's premium so much better. Have you programmed it to what you do? I often find that helps if you put in a bit about your job role and what you need from it.

God yes. So so so so shit. It can never ever find any emails and I end up searching manually and find them in under a minute. For some reason its little shitty window is open all the time on my outlook like the new Clippy. Bugger off!!

This is fine if you are in a very codable role. But my role differs from hour to hour. I can be a teacher, a researcher, a senior manager, a colleague, a friend, a parent all from the same email box. It also doesn't seem to learn that emails to Richard should be polite, emails to Dave should be passive aggressive because he's a twat, and emails to Sarah should have loads of GIFs because we both hate life at work and a kitten here and to there helps.

Outlook can do that already @DeftGoldHedgehog set up a rule...

I personally think the free version is ok.

I had premium at work, getting copilot to set up an agent made so many laborious jobs much easier.

Whatever version you have, you have to be ultra specific - do A, d not do b, order it this way, do not think about other options etc...

But you have to cross check. It makes mistakes.

Ive written strategies, processes etc with it. I find it helpful.

Sorry but I bloody love it - it's been writing me all kinds of docs in no time at all and is able to draw on local policies etc that need to be cited but without me having to go trawling through the intranet and finding the right info.

I also use it if I have one of those brain fart moments where you just can't get a sentence or paragraph to flow - quick copy and paste into CP and it's much better!

I think I used ChatGPT but it's useless too. I'd taken a photo in bright sunlight of a cheque presentation by a group of women to a charity. Nice pic apart from the shadows. Asked AI to remove shadows. It cropped the pic so much the bits with shadows were removed. Second attempt it removed the faces of three women. I gave up and did the best I could.

I then asked it to design a birthday card for DH special birthday - it gave me some text but no picture so it was useless.

Previously I've had to tell it what the Equality Act says - it told me that 'gender identity' is a protected characteristic, which is like a red rag to a bull! It did thank me for educating it. But it doesn't remember, because someone has programmed it to spout gender crap.

My head of equality used it every obviously to answer me a legal question and got it wrong. I was quite shocked by it really. Not that the AI got it wrong but it showed her to be lazy and ignorant. Not a great look!

The paid for version is excellent.

I use it with Excel all the time to help analyse data, things that wouid have taken hours are now done in minutes.

The skill in it is knowing how to write the prompts it needs, in a way it can understand. I did a half day training course and it proved invaluable.

Need to get my head round Agents

You don't have to write the prompts. Just ask it verbally to write a prompt for you and then use that.

I use the paid version of Gemini and chatgpt. My colleagues use Claude. We are all supposed to use copilot but no one does.

I hate it. It needs such micromanaging, that’s not my style. I like to work with human beings that understand what we are doing and why.

copilot just turns out generic shit and can’t cope with a series of prompts as it forgets what your starting instruction was.

I have 30+ outlook folders though so maybe I am too old school.

I used it a lot, I write whatever then stick it in Chat GPT and ask it if there's anything else I can add. If it suggests anything I make amendments. But I never ask it to write a piece. I don't trust it that much. 🙂