In March last year, Microsoft announced the launch of Microsoft 365 Copilot, announcing the integration of AI tools based on large language models into Microsoft Office, with features that include the use of AI for content creation, improving work efficiency, and more. Copilot, which is embedded into the Office suite, is able to generate content based on commands directly while editing documents, as well as analyze and organize documents in a pane via a sidebar, and more. As an office worker who has to deal with Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook every day, I coveted this feature.
However, at the time, the integration of Copilot into Office was just a look at the concept video, even though it was just opened to business users in November last year. However, last month, Microsoft announced the Copilot Pro subscription, which integrates The New Bing, Windows Copilot, and other features that are already on the market, and finally implants them into the Office suite and opens them up to individual users at a price of $20/month.
Copilot Free Edition vs. Copilot Pro
In a nutshell, Copilot Pro unlocks the following three main features that build on the existing free version of Microsoft Copilot to provide a faster and easier Copilot AI experience: Accelerated response for AI image generation in Image Creator for Microsoft Designer. Get 15 accelerated responses per day with the free version; 100 with Copilot Pro.
Use Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps, including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook, to use Copilot to help summarize document content, create new paragraphs, generate PPT pages, and even directly generate Excel tables and data analysis.
Get priority access to GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo during peak hours. While GPT-4 is already available in the free Copilot, a subscription to Copilot Pro gives you priority access to GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo for conversations during peak hours as well.
Microsoft Designer Image Creator
The previous Bing Image Creator is now integrated into Microsoft Designer, using a DALL-E 3-based model to create images based on user-suggested prompts.Copilot Pro provides Image Creator with an accelerated response limit of 100 times per day. According to tests, Designer can create images based on user-suggested content, colors, text, styles, and more, with the option to tweak them with different styles after creation.
You can also use Image Creator directly on the Copilot app, or go to the Microsoft Designer website and open Image Creator. Once you’ve created your artwork, you can choose to save it to an album or copy a link that directs you to the current artwork, which you can then open to view the image, the prompt you used, and other information. You can open the link to view the image, the prompt used, and other information.
Integrating Copilot Pro with Microsoft 365 Apps
According to Microsoft’s official support documentation, Copilot Pro is currently integrated with Word, Outlook, OneNote, PowerPoint and Excel. In terms of supported platforms, Copilot Pro supports some Microsoft 365 programs on the Web, Windows, macOS, and iPadOS. Copilot Pro support for Excel, for example, is still in preview, and only supports English prompts at this time.
I tested Copilot’s integration with each of these apps on macOS to see what they had to offer in terms of language support, feature richness, and usability.
In most cases, Copilot’s sidebar pane opens in the app, where you can work directly with the current document (or selected text, objects, etc.). In Word, Outlook, and even in editors, you can use Copilot to generate and edit content directly.
Word
In Word, Copilot has the following main functions:
Summarizes the content of a document and can answer user questions about the content of the document.
Helping the user to create and modify content.
and generating tables of data based on the content of the document.
The “Summarize document content and answer user questions about it” requires a dedicated Copilot sidebar; the latter two features can be accessed by clicking Copilot on the left side of the editing line when editing in-line in a Word document.
Answering questions and solving problems
Open the Copilot pane in Word and you can ask Copilot questions, which can include changes or creations to a paragraph or section of an article, understanding of the content of an article, and questions about the use of Word. For example, I downloaded an encyclopedia article about Alessandro Volt from Baidu Encyclopedia and asked Copilot some questions about Volt’s life, death, and biography, etc. Copilot was able to provide accurate answers to a certain extent.
In addition, Copilot can be asked to expand on its answers. For example, ask Copilot what kinds of electrical experiments Volts has done, and after getting the answer, you can also ask for more detailed information about a certain project according to its answer.
Of course, the information generated by the AI about the document is not necessarily particularly accurate or comprehensive, and can be a bit ‘jerky’ in some cases. If it involves speculation about the original text, the answer may not always be accurate.
Also, occasionally I get a message that Copilot doesn’t support my prompt language, but Microsoft’s support page is clear that Copilot supports prompts in simplified Chinese.
Finally, Copilot can also provide information on how to use specific features of Word. For example, if you want to know how to indent the first line of all paragraphs by 2 characters, you can also ask Copilot.
Composition and Rewriting
We can also use Copilot for article creation or rewriting existing paragraphs. If Copilot is enabled, the Copilot pane will pop up the moment you create a new document and ask the user what they want to write.
Creating and rewriting can be done by clicking the Copilot button on the left side of the edit line after selecting content, and by changing the tone of the rewrite, e.g., “neutral,” “professional,” “casual,” “imaginative,” “concise,” and so on. The rewritten paragraph can directly replace the original text or be inserted below the existing paragraph.
Copilot’s authoring function seems to be able to handle some simple writing at this stage, and can form a more logical and basic information article. For example, I asked Copilot to write on the topic of “The journey of a cup of coffee”, and it outputted an article on the whole process of coffee, from its origin, cultivation, processing, roasting to brewing and drinking, which gives some introduction to the beverage. You can check out the article written by Copilot by clicking here.
If you are not satisfied with the article, you can fine-tune it by entering a new prompt. For example, if I want to add a paragraph on “The health benefits of drinking coffee” to the previous article on coffee, I can just tell Copilot about it. In this case, Copilot seems to regenerate the whole article instead of adding to it. If you want to continue the article based on the original text, you can just leave the text as it is now and click again on the left side of the edit line to bring up the “Draft with Copilot” window.
Automatic generation of data tables from text
Copilot in Word also supports generating data tables based on text descriptions.
Outlook
For the record, Copilot in Outlook is only supported for work or school accounts, or Microsoft personal accounts using outlook.com, hotmail.com, live.com, and msn.com. If you are using other third-party email addresses, Copilot in Outlook is not yet available.
Although the official support page states that Copilot can be used with Outlook on Windows, outlook.com, and Outlook on macOS, I’m still not seeing a Copilot button or content in Outlook after meeting all the eligibility requirements; if you’re already using Copilot Pro with Outlook, you’re welcome to check it out. If you’ve already used Copilot Pro in Outlook, you’re welcome to share it in the comments section.
In Outlook, Copilot has the following features:
- Assist in composing emails
- Automatically generate replies based on context
- Summarize email strings
- Guides email writing
The Verge ‘s editor mentioned that he particularly liked the way Copilot summarizes email conversations, generating a summary of the key messages of the email and the current email conversation at the top of each email. For most people who are drowning in signatures, illustrations, and forms in often lengthy email conversations, having an AI help summarize them is probably a huge relief.
Copilot in Outlook can also be used to generate emails, where the content of the email is automatically generated based on a prompt provided by the user. In addition, Outlook also supports Copilot to provide suggestions for user-written emails, such as how to improve the tone of the email, the degree of fluency, etc., kind of like AI-powered Microsoft Editor.
OneNote
Copilot is currently only supported in the Windows version of OneNote, and is not yet available in the macOS and iPadOS versions of OneNote.
Copilot is currently used in OneNote to organize information.
For example, it summarizes information from page notes, and generates to-do lists and work plans from note information. In addition, you can also use Copilot to rewrite part of the notes, as well as use Copilot’s chat feature to get detailed information in the notebook, and can also be used to translate and so on. After writing English homework or classroom notes, Copilot can be used to help optimize, summarize, and generate key points, which is a very practical scenario.
In the workplace, Copilot has some good points. For example, during a departmental meeting, a lot of information about the next stage of work is recorded, but it is relatively disorganized, so it is difficult to identify the main lines when organizing it. In this case, you can let Copilot help you organize your next to-do list based on the content of the page.
Copilot in OneNote can also help with other work-related tasks, such as creating a work plan outline for the next project based on the current page content. Although I’ve been getting a lot of “Answer not based on current section/not based on selected content” messages when using Copilot in OneNote so far, the answers are actually pretty reliable.
PowerPoint
In PowerPoint, Copilot can only be accessed through the sidebar, and it is not yet possible to access Copilot while editing text as in Word.
In PowerPoint, Copilot has the following main functions:
Create a whole PPT from blank.
Edit PPT pages.
Organize existing PPT pages into sections automatically.
Learn and answer questions about PPT content.
Create an entire PPT from blank
Copilot automatically generates a full PPT based on the prompts entered in the sidebar, and the current PPT page is “minimal”, consisting of images and some text. However, Copilot will automatically add comments to the speaker’s notes area, which is equivalent to generating the speech. Of course, if necessary, you can ask Copilot to add the corresponding PPT.
For example, I asked Copilot to help me generate a PPT on the history of English, and the result it generated contains a simple cover, a division of the history of English into several phases (Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, etc.), as well as landmarks and features of each of these phases, which is basically correct, but very simple.
Organizing PPT Pages
Copilot also has the ability to automatically organize existing PPT pages into sections. It can distill the main content of a PPT and add a title cover to each section, and automatically divide the PPT file into subsections. However, I tested it with the History of English PPT, and it doesn’t seem to have the ability to fully understand the content of the PPT — the pages “Beowulf” (which belongs to Old English) and “The Great Vowel Shift” (which belongs to Middle English) that I just added are not automatically categorized into the corresponding stages of English evolution, but remain in the same place as they were when they were added. were added.
Adding elements to specific pages
Copilot also supports adding text paragraphs, images, and other elements to PPT pages. For example, I added an example of Old English to the “Old English” page and asked Copilot to bring in its modern English translation, which Copilot did with ease, as well as a related image. However, Copilot doesn’t give the image a proper layout, but just lets the image cover the whole PPT page, which needs to be adjusted by the user.
In addition, it seems that Copilot in PowerPoint currently only supports adding text and images to a page. If you ask about adding tables and the like, the answer is a guide on how to add the corresponding page elements.
Excel
For Excel, Copilot is still in the preview stage and only supports English prompt.
Currently, Copilot in Excel has the following main functions:
Add new columns based on existing data, and formula operations on existing data.
Highlight data by condition.
Sorting of data filtering, as well as simple analysis of data.
Copilot provides a sample data table, which contains a company’s recent marketing activities of some of the data, this paper uses this data table for a simple experience.
Adding Formula Fields
In Copilot, you can add formula columns to your data. For example, if Copilot’s example data contains two columns, “Total Target Customers” and “Number of Engaged Users”, we can divide the latter by the former to get a conversion rate figure and add it to Excel. Copilot understands natural language to a certain extent, for example, we can ask it to calculate the profit of each campaign, and it will help us to calculate it by subtracting “Budget” from “Revenue” using “Revenue”. “minus “Budget”.
Sorting, Filtering, and Highlighting Data
Copilot can also sort, filter, and highlight data through natural language understanding, for example, you can say “highlight the top two revenue figures,” “sort the number of participating users from top to bottom,” “filter campaigns with a budget of less than $1,000,” and so on, to perform the corresponding operations on the data.
However, during the screening process, I have also found that Copilot has not been able to fulfill my requests on some occasions. For example, when I tried to get it to filter out campaigns launched in February, Copilot replied that it was unable to do so at the moment, and highlighting campaigns launched in February never worked either.
Adding Pivot Tables and Analyzing Data
Copilot in Excel also allows you to add pivot tables (and pivot charts) and directly categorize and calculate by the fields we specify.
In the example data, we can use the corresponding prompts to summarize the total budget for different campaign types, or the average revenue, and so on. For example, if you say to Copilot, “Create a pivot table to calculate average revenue by campaign type, Copilot will create a new pivot table in the sidebar and provide a preview of it, which you can add to the new worksheet if needed. A pivot table is created directly from the new worksheet and can be manipulated in a variety of ways.
Copilot can also provide some analytical suggestions for existing data. For example, the prompt “Insights with column” might tell you the relationship between different columns of data. On both occasions, it suggests that this column of data is “highly correlated” with another column, etc.
In fact, from my personal point of view, Copilot in Excel application I am most looking forward to: on the one hand, I hope that Copilot can be from the perspective of AI to the data analysis insights, can think of I may not think of the analysis of the dimensions; on the other hand, I also hope that the AI can work on behalf of some of the more complex formulas and operations, without having to manually operate all. But at present, Copilot seems to be only an assistant that can understand natural language to a certain extent, and it really needs to make more efforts.
Copilot App
In addition to its integration into Office, Copilot Pro offers a chatbot service that can be used through the Copilot app, or on the web.Copilot’s interface is similar to that of the previous The New Bing, with three styles of responses; two of which are available for GPT-4: Creative and Precise.Copilot Pro offers priority use of GPT-4 during peak hours. Copilot Pro offers priority access to GPT-4 during peak hours.
The Copilot app can be accessed through the Windows Copilot sidebar, mobile apps, and web pages, and can basically be thought of as a web-enabled ChatGPT, answering all sorts of questions and searching the web for information that is more up-to-date than ChatGPT.
In Conclusion
Copilot Pro, Microsoft’s ambitious AI product, has already been integrated into Office applications with the help of GPT-4’s large language model. However, the experience of Copilot Pro can only be said to be unsatisfactory, not only do you need to use a specific network environment, but also the price of $20 a month is really expensive. After the experience, I feel that Copilot’s development still needs to be optimized from the following two aspects “hand in hand”.
On the one hand, it needs to support more Office functions: at present, Copilot supports relatively few Office functions, such as formatting specific text elements, adding/deleting/editing specific page elements, and so on, and it can’t do what it says on the tin, and it often encounters some prompts that are beyond Copilot’s capability, so it has to be realized manually. often encountered that some prompts are beyond Copilot’s current capabilities and have to be realized manually.
On the other hand, the understanding of natural language and the response speed need to be faster and more accurate: the current Copilot based on the large language model already has a fairly accurate level of understanding of natural language, which is obviously much smarter than Siri and the like. However, Copilot is clearly more accurate in responding to specific commands. In addition, Copilot’s response time isn’t quite as fast as it could be, probably due to network factors.
Published by Tony Shepherd & last updated on April 13, 2024 8:23 am
