Word

- [Presenter] Copilot in Word is a fantastic assistant to have on hand in so many scenarios. Maybe you've taken notes and you need to convert them into coherent sentences and paragraphs to share with others. Maybe you have an overly wordy document that you need to convert into something more digestible, or perhaps you're just staring at a blank document wondering where to get started. Copilot can even help with things like translating text from foreign languages and giving you a summary of long documents. And of course, as always, how you phrase your prompt can make a significant impact on the results you get from Copilot. Let's take a look at a couple of examples. We're starting here with the proverbial blank page, and let's imagine a situation where you need to write a cover letter for a sales job. I'm going to click the Copilot button on the page, and that opens up the Draft with Copilot panel where we can enter prompts when we want Copilot to start a first draft of a document for us. And let's type a very basic prompt of, "Write a cover letter for a sales job," and I'll click Generate. And there it is. And looking this over, this isn't a bad start to a cover letter in terms of structure, but if you read through it, we have a lot of generic or possibly inaccurate placeholder information, so we'd have to spend a decent amount of time editing, adding and removing content from this first draft to customize it. A better way to write a prompt for this purpose would be to include some or all of the ingredients we looked at earlier of a good prompt, like goal, context, source, and expectations. So I'm going to click the trash button here to delete this, and we'll open up the prompt window again. And let's start this prompt off with, "Please write a cover letter for a sales job "at Landon Hotels." So there's our goal and our context. We want it to write a cover letter for Landon Hotels, and we included a please, because as we discussed earlier, politeness in prompts can generate more positive and professional responses. Next, "Mention that I've been a sales manager at Microsoft "for the past seven years, "with a focus on service industry customers, "and I've consistently been in the top 5% "of performers on our team, "and our team has increased overall sales "by 12% in the past two years." So there I'm providing some specific information for Copilot to use as a source to generate this letter. And let's end this prompt with the expectation or guidance of how this letter should be written. I'll tell it to keep the tone friendly and professional, list my achievements in a bulleted list, and to end with a call to action requesting an interview to discuss how I can contribute to the team. All right, so let's click Generate and see what we get. Alright, so this is a lot more personalized than what we initially got with the basic prompt of, "Write me a cover letter for a sales job." We have the tone, information, and structure that we requested, including this bulleted list of highlights. Now, Copilot has still included some generic placeholder information, which I can either edit or eliminate, but you can see how this gets us a lot further along in our starting draft. You can also keep having Copilot refine your text if you need changes. In the prompt window, click in this field and enter a prompt to refine your text. For example, I might say, "Keep the word count under 250 words. "Mention that I have immediate availability." Then click the arrow to regenerate the text. And there it is. You can see here we're at 237 words, and here's the line about my immediate availability. Now, the nice thing about this is in the prompt window, you can use these arrows to switch back and forth between your results to decide which one you prefer to use as the starting point for your document. Now, if there are elements of both that you like, you might want to copy and paste 'em into a separate document and edit them together. But in this case, let's say that I like version two. So with that selected, I'll click Keep it, and now I have this starting draft for my cover letter. Alright, so that's an example of the elements of a good prompt when drafting from a blank document. Now let's take a look at an example of what you can do when working with an existing document. So here we have a longer document with around 2,300 words that details the history and information about the Landon Hotel chain. So, Copilot can help us better understand this document in a number of different ways. When you want to ask Copilot questions about a document and not necessarily generate content for the document, start by clicking the Copilot button in the Home tab to open up the Copilot panel. Now, another aspect of good prompt writing we mentioned earlier is to keep your interactions with Copilot conversational, meaning you might want to have a back and forth conversation with Copilot in some cases to really zero in on what you need from a document. For example, maybe I just received this document and I want to get the gist of what information it covers and contains. So since we don't really have anything specific to ask yet, let's start with a simple prompt to summarize the document for us. We could either type Summarize this doc in this prompt area at the bottom of the panel, or in this case we already have that prompt suggestion here at the top, also here as well, so I'll click either one of those. And now we have the summary of the entire document that Copilot has organized into sections for us. So I can read about the history, so I can read a summary of the history, the locations and neighborhoods, the executive team, and again, we have references or citations, and clicking any of those takes us to that location in the document and that way we can see the information in context. But with this summary, we now have a great overview of what this document contains, all from a very basic prompt, and the summary will probably give us plenty of ideas of what to ask next to figure out what's important to us here at the moment. So maybe I'm interested in learning more about what makes some of the hotel locations special or unique in relation to the neighborhoods they're in. So let's try a prompt of, "Tell me more about the San Francisco and London locations, "focusing specifically on any unique ways "in which they fit into their surrounding neighborhoods." So again, following good prompt writing practices, I'm providing what cities I want to know about, as well as what information I specifically require. So I'll click Send, and now we have that information again with citations leading us to those points in the document where we can read the details in context. It even offers some follow up prompt suggestions, like what are the amenities at the San Francisco location or the amenities at the London location. So you can imagine how we could just continue like this to familiarize ourselves and zoom in on the details of any aspect of the document, all by keeping things conversational with Copilot as we continue exploring the document. For another look at using Copilot in Microsoft Word, be sure to check out my course called "Copilot in Word: Create and Refine Documents with AI."