Draft a new document from scratch

- [Instructor] Copilot is a great resource to have at your fingertips when you're staring at the proverbial blank slate, wondering where to start with the document that you need to create. I've started up Word, and let's create a new blank document. When you first do this, you may see some of these Copilot prompts above the document. We have things like Produce insights from file, Create a proposal based on file, Draft a business memo, and clicking on any of these automatically starts a prompt in this prompt area. So when you write a command or request to an AI, what you're writing is called a prompt. Now, we're not going to get too deeply into all the best practices of prompt writing in this course, but as a general rule, it's a good idea to be clear about what you want to provide some context and to be as specific as possible. So for example, let's say I'm a manager. and I want to create a document to help guide my employees through the process of writing their annual self-reviews. To have Copilot help me draft this document from scratch, I might write something like, "Act as a manager and generate a set of guidelines to help employees write their annual self-review, provide a checklist of items for employees to work through, keep the language and tone of the document professional." So here I'm telling it to take on the perspective of being a manager, and I'm telling it what I want, a checklist my employees can follow to guide them through their self-evaluations, and I specified that the tone and language should be professional. Now, given that I told it to act as a manager, the tone and language would be pretty professional, but I like including these kinds of instructions so there isn't any doubt about what I want. All right, so I'll come down here and click the Generate button and see what we get. And there it is. So just like that, we've gone from blank page to this multi-page formatted document. So for my brief prompt, it's generated sections like the Introduction, Guidelines for Writing Your Self-Review, which is broken down into Reflect on Your Achievements, Be Honest and Objective, Use Specific Examples, and so on. And we have a conclusion at the end. Now, of course, even though this generated document can apply to any number of organizations or roles, it's a good idea to always consider Copilot-generated content as a first draft, and to always read every word it generates to make sure it applies to your situation and to customize it to suit your needs. Notice it even says here in the prompt window that AI-generated content may be incorrect. So never just take what it generates and send it out into the world without reviewing and rewriting it yourself. Now with that said, if the results weren't quite what you were looking for or if you want to make a slight change, Copilot can continue to help you. We'll talk more about revising and refining text in the next chapter. But some things you can do after generating your content include coming down to the prompt window, and here we have a Keep it button, which you can click if you're happy with the results. If you want to try again, you can click the Regenerate button and it will go through the entire process again, giving you slightly different results from the same prompt. So now we have a new version of the document to check out, and the great thing about this is you can come down to the prompt window and use these arrows to switch back and forth between the different versions to see 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, but in this case, let's say I like version two, so with that selected, I'll click Keep it. And now I have the starting point for my document to work with. Again, we'll look more closely at revising and rewriting content in the next chapter, but for now, that's just one example of using Copilot to draft a new document from nothing. From other blank documents, you could have Copilot draft a letter or generate an article or a social media post. In fact, for some examples of prompts you could use, from the Home ribbon, we'll click the Copilot button to open up the Copilot panel. This is another area where you can write your prompts, but this is more for taking advantage of Copilot's abilities, like chatting, answering questions, and so on. We'll be spending more time in this panel later. But you can see here that we have some prompt starters, like Summarize this doc, Create an image, Tell me more about the references this document makes, and so on. And you'll often see additional prompts down here at the bottom, like, Summarize this doc and Is there a call to action? Also down here, you can click the View prompts button, which gives me this window with some prompt examples for creating content, Write more confidently, Find specific information. We can also click this Tasks menu to narrow down the types of prompts we want to see here. And that gives me some ideas, like Craft headline candidates Create FAQ, and so on. So I could start with one of these, like Create FAQ, which places a prompt into the prompt field that I can then customize as needed. Or, of course, I could just create a new blank document and I can write my own prompts at any time. By the way, if you click into the document and just start typing, and the Copilot prompt field at the top disappears, I can just delete that, and that gives me this Copilot icon in the margin, and clicking that brings these prompts and the prompt field back at the top. And you can always open up the Copilot panel and type your prompt here as well. So for example, maybe this time I'll say, "Generate a list of do's and don'ts to follow when writing a self-evaluation for work." And then I'll click the Send button to have Copilot respond to this prompt. And there it is. Now, unlike using the Copilot prompt in the window of the document itself, using the Copilot panel keeps the responses in the panel, so I can review the content here without affecting my document. But if I like what it's generated, I can click the Copy button and then paste that into my document. All right, so that's using Copilot to draft a new document from scratch. Now, you can also give Copilot documents you already have to use as a reference for information or to match their tone when drafting new content, and we'll see how to do that next.