Word - Microsoft Copilot Tutorial

- [Instructor] 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 some examples, so we're starting here with the proverbial blank page, and imagine a situation where you need to write a cover letter for a sales job. I'm going to click the Copilot button in the margin, and that opens up the Draft with Copilot window, and this is 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." I'll click Generate, and there it is, and this isn't actually 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, particularly like my tenure, my accomplishments, and so on, so we'd have to spend a decent amount of time editing, adding, and removing content from this first draft to customize it, so a better way to write a prompt for this purpose would be to include some or all of the ingredients we looked at earlier, like the goal, context, source, and expectation when it comes to prompt writing, so I'm going to click the trashcan button here to delete this, and I'll click the Copilot button again, and let's start off this prompt with, "Please write a cover letter for a sales job "at Landon Hotels," so there's our goal and context: write a cover letter with Landon Hotels, and we included a please, because, as we discussed earlier, politeness in prompts can generate more positive and professional responses. Next, I'll say, "Mention that I have 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 now let's end this prompt with the expectation or guidance of how this letter should be written. I'll say, "Keep the tone friendly and professional. "List my achievements in a bulleted list. "End with a call to action requesting an interview "to discuss how I can contribute to their team." All right, now let's click Generate and see what we get. And there it is, so this is a lot more personalized than what we initially got with the basic, "Write me a cover letter for a sales job" prompt. We have the tone, information, and structure that we requested, including this bulleted list of highlights, and you can see how this gets us much further along in our starting draft, and there's a lot less I have to edit or eliminate, and you can also keep having Copilot refine your text if you need changes. In the prompt window, click in the 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 we click the arrow here to regenerate the text, and now we have the slightly shorter version. Notice it added the line, "I am available immediately." Now, the nice thing here is you can use these arrows in the prompt window 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 them into a separate document and work on incorporating them together, but in this case, let's say I like version two, so with that selected, I'll click Keep it, 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, 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 have anything specific to ask about it yet, let's start with a simple prompt to summarize the document for us. We can either type, "Summarize this," in the prompt area at the bottom of the panel, or in this case, we already have a prompt suggestion here, Summarize this doc. I could click that or click the button right up here, and then click send to send the prompt. And now we have a summary of the entire document that Copilot has organized into sections for us, including citations. Clicking on a citation takes us to that part of the document so we can see the information in context, but with a 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 that 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. We'll send that prompt, 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, 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."