Microsoft 365 Copilot - Word Copilot Hands On

this is Microsoft 365 co-pilot in word and in my recent video overviewing some of the features of Microsoft 365 co-pilot I mentioned the fact that one of the areas where I've been most impressed is its integration into Microsoft Word but in that video I only got to show off a couple of the things that you can do in Word with co-pilot so in this video I'm going to dig into this a little bit more deeply I'm going to show you some of the features that I've been using in co-pilot in word and I'm going to highlight some of the areas where I think there is room for Microsoft to improve this product to make it even better and talk about who this is really a product for as always anything you see on screen during my demos is either publicly accessible information or is content that's been created specifically for my demos so there's nothing private that's being shared let's dig in so when you open Word with Microsoft 365 co-pilot license to your account you get a slightly different experience in that you get this um draft with co-pilot window that pops up and you can see that you get a co-pilot button on your Ribbon as well now I took a quick look to see if there's a way to turn off this popping up by default and I couldn't find one so I think there are some people who may be a little bit confused by this but overall I actually think that copilot is positioned in such a way that it's obvious that you have it but it's not so much in your face that you have to use it I mean if you click out of this you can just start typing um but if you jump onto a new line and you find that you want to use co-pilot this little icon appears and you can just click on that and your box to interact with co-pilot will reappear so in terms of the design of how this is included in the app in Balance I think Microsoft has done a really good job in terms of using copilot itself pretty much everything you're going to generate that falls on your page in word is going to come through this draft with co-pilot window and here you can either tell it something that you want it to create and it'll create that based on its knowledge or the knowledge of the AI model that sits behind it or you can include content that exists Within your Microsoft 365 account content that you as a user have access to right from here so unlike using something like chat GPT where you can include files there's no kind of looking for those files you can just type in what you want and it'll include it from here so first of all let's see what it can do with just creating a a document from scratch without any referenced files and I'm starting with a very general prompt create a short overview of how to successfully design a new product and once you're happy with your prompt you just go ahead and click on generate and in general I'm finding I haven't done any timing side by side on this but my feeling is that in general um co-pilot is taking about the same amount of time that we would have seen chat GPT take for a similar amount of output I I don't think it's substantially faster or substantially slower you're not waiting a huge amount of time for things to come through co-pilot but obviously what you're seeing here is you do get it laid out with Styles so if you want to alter these Styles you already have the ability to do that here because it's laid out with heading Styles and so on and so forth so there are some um productivity enhancements that you get just by doing this in word because it's fitting into the way that word works as an app rather than you just having to copy and paste text from somewhere else and then work it out for yourself once it gets there so you can see it creates your um your document for you and once it's created any text you can review it and then you can come down here you can either get rid of it you can regenerate it you can decide to keep it or you could go ahead and um change it in some way and the other thing you can do that's not so obvious from here is you can actually click here and it'll take you back to your prompt so you can uh you can change that prompt and regenerate totally but from here you can just say I want to make it more formal I want to make it shorter whatever it is so let's say um make each section bullet points and then I'm going to click on generate and once that's finished you get exactly the same box again and you can keep doing this for as long as you like really so you can keep tinkering with it or you can keep it and then you can start moving around things as you want to so you just jump in here and you can edit and um this is just a normal Word document once you've um once you've got rid of that co-pilot box but I think what I want to do is to add some more content at the top of this so let's go ahead and just create a new line and you can see as soon as I create a new line I get my co-pilot um icon again so I can just start typing here and I can type whatever I want or if I want co-pilot to work with me I can open up my co-pilot box so now I'm going to ask it to add a specific section and in this case I want it to add an executive summary section so I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to add that there and it will create content in line dependent on where your cursor was when you put in that request so it's kind of like if you had a chat GPT chat but you could go back to the top of of what chat GPT has produced for you and insert some additional content there you can't do that with something like chat GPT without copying and pasting your document somewhere else or your content somewhere else but in word you can do as much or as little of this as you want so the thing that I've noticed here is this isn't consistent with the formatting of the rest of the documents so let's change that and once it's finished you can go back and review what it's done in this I'm just going to keep it now one of the things I do find interesting is that the output that co-pilot creates for you disagrees with the suggestions the editor has in terms of making your text good so I think that is an area of improvement for Microsoft now that's kind of the first experience of using co-pilot the other place that we can use copilot is we can open our co-pilot pane over here and so what this gives us the opportunity to do is we can say we've opened a document and this is a new document for us and maybe it's a little bit longer than U than this someone shared it with us so one of the things I can do is say summarize this document and you can see it generates a summary it provides references so you know where it's grabbing information from um so it will show you the the line of the document that it's it's using for that um not really sure it would be great if when hovering over this it like showed you the the line over here or something so you can get some context but again there are areas where this can be improved over time one of the things you can't do from this pain is you can't interact directly with the text over here so I can't do something like turn all the bullets in this document into long form text so really what this pain is there for is to interact with the content of the document in a very similar way to the edge um sidebar that includes Bing chat Enterprise versus being able to do anything um with the document so far as my testing so far anyway um but you can create content in the pain which you can then copy and paste over into your word document if you wanted to in much the same way is using Bing chat Enterprise or using chat GPT so starting with a new document this time I'm actually going to pull in data from somewhere else so I said create a handout for audience members to go with this presentation and then if I want to include a file I can either click on my reference a file button here or I can just use a slash in line so I'm going to go ahead and do that and I I'm going to type in PPT so that I get my um presentation that I've got here you just basically type in the name of what you want and it'll find documents that match up to that so I'm going to use my fabulously fun spaceship presentation and I'm just going to go ahead and generate and when you're using your own content it does tend to take a little bit longer than just generating from scratch um but that's very similar to what we see in other services like chat GPT as well you can see it's going through and it's creating information I think this is based on each of the slides that are there and you can either keep it or um get rid of it as you could before um now what you can't do here if you're doing something like this and you're referencing a PowerPoint is you can't say to it include images of the slides this is text based right now and if you want to do something that's more kind of graphical image based you kind of need to do that somewhere like PowerPoint you're not going to be able to do that in word so I've got two documents in my demo project my fabulously fun spaceship project um one of them is a project overview that includes some information about marketing and the other one is a marketing plan so to compare the two documents the overview document and the marketing plan document provide a summary of these documents including a section that presents any significant differences in their marketing planning as a table and then I'm going to go ahead and generate that and so this is pretty flexible it's not just a matter of saying I have three doc reference them all you can be creative in what you want to do with those documents you are limited to three documents though so there is a a harder number limit on the number of documents you can use here than there is somewhere else like chat GPT right now and you can see that it has indeed created this content as a table for me so you can be pretty creative in what it is that you're trying to to work with here and you can build some pretty nice documents the last thing I want to highlight light is that everywhere you're working with co-pilot you really are not too far away from any help and I think this is really important because I I think Microsoft 365 co-pilot is really aimed at everyone whereas a product like chat GPT you probably need to have at least some interest in using AI in order to engage with it but copilot is relevant to anyone who uses word or PowerPoint or Excel or any of the other or any of the other office apps that we know about 50% of businesses around the world use so when it comes to opening your side panel you can see that you get some prompts that you can work with you also get this little um view prompt button down here and if you click on this you can see there are a whole bunch of different prompts that you can try out and if you click on view more prompts it takes you to this window here here co-pilot lab and you can look for different prompts and you can even save prompts that you're interested in using later and so if you want to use one of these prompts we're just going to go ahead and click on the prompt and you can see I've got the start of the prompt here and I can just continue on that prompt and use it um bear in mind though that that content will appear here it won't necessarily appear over here so hopefully that provide you with a good overview of how you might want to start using co-pilot in word and I really do think that this provides a a good kind of road map of what is Microsoft 365 co-pilot all about it's not revolutionary AI I mean if if this had appeared back in the fall of 20122 then we would all be like wow this is amazing that you can do this with AI but chat GPT has already done that and we've got lots of products that have come along in the interim that have had those kind of wow moments too and in many ways Microsoft isn't a wow company Microsoft is a company that provides tools that you can rely upon as a business every single day word is 40 years old so we can't imagine that the inclusion of AI in word is going to radically change it there are lots of people who have been using word for a very long time and want to continue using it in exactly the same way but what this does is creates a bridge it creates a bridge to this revolutionary technology this technology that has made many of us say wow it's amazing that you can do that but made it accessible to everyone it's right there in the app you don't have to get out of your flow and jump somewhere else and copy and paste stuff and then work out how to format it properly and so on and so forth that are all the problems that come with using a platform like chat GPT which is separate to your main productivity apps by including this in word we're getting much the same functionality that we've already seen but it's packaged neatly so that anyone is able to use it and so I I think this is a product that eventually the majority of office users are going to want to be using because it allows you to add that productivity enhancement that some people have got from AI so far and give it to everyone what do you think are you impressed by what you've seen co-pilot in word can do are you impressed by how you see that co-pilot and the AI feature set is integrated into an app that everyone knows how to use or is this underwhelming for you you is this something that you won't any longer be looking out for and wanting to get let me know down in the comments thanks for watching through to the end I hope this was useful to you um hopefully I will be able to do a few more videos where I dive into some of the co-pilot features in other apps as well do drop me a note down in the comments to let me know which ones you would be most interested in but until the next video bye-bye

Channel: Bright Ideas Agency

Views: 7,816

Keywords: microsoft copilot review, microsoft copilot, generative ai, microsoft 365 copilot, microsoft 365, copilot 365, microsoft 365 copilot word, microsoft word, copilot ai, microsoft 365 copilot ai, microsoft copilot 365, microsoft ai, copilot in word, copilot for work, microsoft copilot ai

Id: 6nTgUYPU-Sc

Length: 15min 40sec (940 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 13 2023