Using copilot (the paid version) to increase efficiency

[MrsBennetsPoorNerves]

Just wondering if anyone can give me any tips and tricks for ways in which I can optimise the benefits of copilot to improve my efficiency in work? What clever things can it do that I might not have thought of?!

I have adhd if it makes any difference, so if there are particular things that any adhd-ers have found helpful in terms of keeping on top of their workload, I would love to hear about them!

I think it’s Teams functionality to transcribe a meeting actually (maybe only when it’s being recorded?), and then you can use Copilot to search the transcription, summarise it, write minutes etc.

‘Write me an itinerary’ is another handy thing! ‘Write me an itinerary for a day out in London arriving at x station, visiting x museum, leaving an hour for lunch in a park and give me all the tube lines I need to take between destinations and the opening time for the museum’. ‘Actually I also want to visit x shop, please rewrite the itinerary to include that’. Be as specific as you can with it.

This is the excel tutorial I was thinking of…

One of our consultants used it to take meeting minutes except we were all in a physical room with only a few people dialling in so it thought everyone in the room was the same person.

Apparently we were talking Turkish too at some point.

File under "nice idea but useless in practice".

Okay - I've been using the work paid one for the last year. I'm pretty good with it. If the home page has a green shield it's secure and data isn't going back out.

Meetings - you have to turn on transcript for copilot to work. Some people really don't want transcript if anything sensitive is being discussed so be aware and sensitive to this. I find the meeting summary is okay but high level - you get a much more detailed meeting write up if you build it up as you go in the side bar. Summarise what Kevin said, etc as you go - and paste into a doc.

In Word it is a really helpful copy editor- highlight a para and click the symbol in the margin of Word and it give 3 different rewrites - I always find something helpful doing this.

Most useful is the copilot right-side bar in Word I use this all the time
-this doc is a report- write an Executive summary.

• summarise this document in for 500 words
• I'm writing a business plan doc, rewrite in this format.

You get the drift - I think you will find this most helpful and I would focus on this functionality.

I use it for ideas, for example, describe a situation or a project and ask it to summarise risks and mitigation that might apply. To suggest actions and timelines. It works great as a starting point and to produce a decent amount of text in seconds that you can then review and adjust. It cuts the job down substantially timewise.

@MrsBennetsPoorNerves in terms of excel it is good if you don't use excel much as it can do basic stuff but if you are used to formulae it is quicker to do it yourself. I am sure it will get better as they develop it.

@TheSassyAmberNewt thanks … I’m going to try to figure that out ( I’m old 😩) but they eiikd be a game changer for me !
Much appreciate your response .

Oooh, I like the sound of this. Thank you for asking, OP. I need to bear this in mind.

I use it all the time in my job (social media) but I also tidy up myself after, and I use often another AI to affirm or refine what Copilot gives me. PLEASE if you use it to write copy ask it to ditch the AI cliches. All I see these days are ads are obviously AI generated, copy and pasted without being run by a human!

I recently went on an Excel course, which opened my eyes to how much you can actually do on Excel! Later on, when I couldn't figure out a formula I asked AI to write it - it's great (though needs to be checked as it doesn't always work perfectly - probably more to do with user error / wording of the request). I created a spreadsheet which saves a huge amount of time for our company this way.

File under "nice idea but useless in practice".

Short-sighted. Better to learn what it can and can’t do and harness its capability accordingly. It’s not a mind reader.