Paul Ferrill (0:00)

Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take a step outside of Windows and see some of the things you can do with Copilot in Microsoft360 listeners.

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Paul Ferrill (1:12)

This is twit. Hello everybody, and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Ferratt, and in this episode we're going to take another look at AI credits. These are the things that you get for having a Microsoft 365 subscription, in this case, a consumer subscription. So Microsoft 365 family or personal, but in the Office apps that you get as part of your Microsoft 365 subscription. Right? So in the last episode we looked at how those things occur on the Microsoft Designer website, which is actually part of my Microsoft 365, or in Windows 11 through things like Notepad, Paint, Photos, and eventually, I think the Microsoft 365 copilot app, although today that's not happening. So for you to access the capabilities I'm going to show today, you have to have a Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription through work. A Microsoft 365? Nope. A Microsoft Copilot Pro subscription, which is $20 per user per month on top of a Microsoft 365 subscription, or if you're the owner of a Microsoft 365 consumer subscription, the person who bought personal or family, you get 60 AI credits that you can use toward these tasks every month. This has only been in place for about Two months As I record this, I have yet to use up my AI credits every month. I'm kind of curious what that's going to look like if and when it happens. I'm sure Microsoft will try to sell me on a paid subscription of some kind. But I thought I would step through some of the more obvious things that are available in the key Microsoft 365 apps. Okay, so this is Microsoft Word Word, obviously. And when you enter this app, just like most of the core Office apps that are part of Microsoft 365, you're going to see a couple of obvious notes about Copilot. Right? You've got this text here which disappears as you start typing, I assume. Yes. That tells you you can hit alt I to bring up Copilot. There's a little Copilot icon right here which will bring up that drafting window which we'll look at in a moment. But there's also a Copilot button up here in the ribbon and this one opens this sidebar. And so this is that kind of familiar chat based experience that we know from Copilot on the web or in Windows 11 or on your mobile device or whatever. But it's optim optimized for working with the document that is currently loaded in Word. Now for I'm a writer, I guess I'm a professional writer. I make money writing or whatever, but I don't have any plans. I never have to use AI to write for me. But I think this is the type of thing that's going to be really beneficial to a lot of people. Most people are not professional writers. Maybe need some help. Whatever it is, it's good at things like just summarizing a document. Right. So to make sense of this, I don't actually use Word day to day, so I'll need to find some kind of a document that makes sense. Here's a pretty good one. This is a story that I wrote recently about Gary Kildall and CPM and so forth. I'll just copy in part of this and I'll do that hopefully without any formatting. All right, so I'll just paste this in. And that alone is kind of interesting generally because there's no formatting. I didn't get to see this. But when you paste in something that has a formatting clash with the current document, you'll get this little pop up paste as kind of. It's really a pop up menu or a pop up toolbar of sorts. You'll also get that. You'll get that now and but with Copilot, you get additional options related to copilot. So I'm just going to clean this up a little bit. But actually I could have done this differently, but I will just. Just to get rid of the extraneous spaces. But you can bring this up at any time anyway. You don't need the. You don't need to do what I just described. So just by clicking anywhere in here or selecting anything, I should say you get this pop up and these are the options you get on that. Paste options, the new paste options. Right. So write a prom, which would bring up this type of a thing here. Auto rewrite, which is not going to do too much with three words of selected text or visualize as a table, which I yet to find a use for. But, but that's, that's not. This is not the type of document you would turn into a. Into a table. So let's, let's do a rewrite. So if you think back to how Notepad works, if you have this capability there, it actually gives you all of these explicit options. This one is more general. It just, you just, it just says rewrite. And you can compare what it says down here with what I've got up here. You can switch between three available options, but you might want it to refine it. And it's kind of neat here they give you a little prompt of your own where it says, you know, make it more concise. So I could say something like make this more or yeah, more casual, for example. And then you. The wrong thing. It will draft a rewrite. And I have, I didn't have the other text here to kind of compare the two, but same thing. You get, you get a different option in this case. Now we have four options. So back in the day. Yeah, back in the day. It's pretty, it's pretty casual. The first personal home computers had rom, which is basically read only memory. That is. No, it's not. Basically, it is literally. So, yeah, AI generated content may be incorrect. So it makes sense that you should be taking a look at that thing. But still interesting. Again, this is not the type of thing I would use personally, although I think some sort of a summary kind of thing is kind of an interesting idea. So if you come over here, if this was a really long document, like you could put a PDF in here or whatever. The summary stuff is pretty much universally great. And they typically do it like this with bulleted points. So it just talks about what this is. This document is about. This is really just a short excerpt and early personal computers and rom, the need for standard OS and then how CPM came about for that reason and Microsoft's involvement with that in the early days. So pretty good, right? And that's kind of a neat thing that gets even better when this is a more complex document. All right, so that's word. We look at Excel. So I use, I write every day. I'm a writer, right? But I use Excel one time a year unless something has gone horribly wrong. And that is to update this, this docum here, which tracks the PC, the PCs that have been sold over the past X number of years, right? Since 2006. So every January, what happens is IDC and Gartner and other companies come out with their sales figures for PCs. I use that as data toward an article that I write. And I put in that amount here and I have it generate a chart. And my problem is I only use this once a year. I use it every January. I don't know how to use Excel. I'm not an Excel person. So sometimes I can get it correct. And correct for me is something that looks like this, right? A version with a different color for every bar. To me this looks pretty good. But sometimes I don't get it right. And sometimes what I get is. So I can find this thing behind there. I know, yeah, here's the old one. I'll just delete this. Actually, it doesn't really matter sometimes. Actually you can see the. Those two years, 2022, 2023. Couldn't figure it out, right? It just all the same color. And you know, I worked on it for 30 minutes or whatever. And I said, you know what? This isn't my career, I need to move on. It doesn't matter if the charts this color. But this is something that AI is pretty good at. So I threw this thing through Gemini Chat, GPT and also co pilot and said, here's the data I pasted in these columns. I want this kind of a chart. I want it to be a bar chart. I want it to be vertical, I want the bars to actually be pretty wide, not tall and thin, et cetera. And they did pretty good. The way that you would do this here is there's a couple of ways. So you get a copilot button up here which opens the pane like you saw in Word, right? So you get the same thing, you could go through there. But they also have this context sensitive copilot, little quick analysis button. And so they have different options here, including for charts. So they call this kind of thing A clustered column chart, I guess. I don't. Again, not in a cell guy. And you can see that what it. Oops. What it created there is that thing I kind of don't want, which is the all blue color. Whatever. So to fix this, I thought, well, okay, I must be able to use Copilot to fix this. I must be able to, right? So the interesting thing is, you can see copilot is grayed out when this is like this. So I can open this thing up and I can say, change this chart so that each column is a different color and so that each column is wider. And my expectation here was I now know what it's going to do is that it would do that for me, right. If I do this in a standalone chatbot, it will actually do that for me. The version in here, for some reason, first says there's a problem, but then it tells you how to do it. And actually, having gone through this, I can tell you that this is actually the information you need to. To make this correct. So if you follow the instructions, I'll just do one of the two, I guess. So try and see. I don't know how to use this thing. So. Format data series. Where is this? Format data series. Format data series. Yeah, here we go. All right. Format data series. So. Oh, and I've lost the instructions. So that's the column width 1 do. I'll do colors. First fill in line and then fill. So we go. Unfortunately, these are filling each other. You can see it says automatic vary colors by point. All right, so there you go. So this is. This is actually the thing I did myself in years past, including this past January, to get this thing right. The other one, if I remember correctly, as this gap with thing. So the instructions tell me to do this. This is not something I invented. But if I make this, say, 21% instead of 20, there it is. And actually, this is exactly what I want. Right. So useful. Didn't get me right to the answer. I feel like this could be better. But even just fumbling through it here again, you can tell I'm not an Excel person by the way I use this app. This is much faster than what I did in years past, including this past January. So, yeah, I would call that one kind of a partial success.