Edit Documents with Copilot in Word

00:00 Let's take a look at the agentic capabilities of Copilot in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. If you've been underwhelmed by Copilot in those apps up until now, please watch this video. There is so much of a difference of what we can do. The idea of agentic is that Copilot can now do things in these apps. So, we're no longer summarize this doc,

00:23 answer questions about that, even well beyond basically creating a single slide or creating a formula in PowerPoint. You can use this, and I'm going to show you how I'm using it side by side in the apps to co-create and do things for you. Trust me, it's worth it. And wait until the end because I'm going to show you one of the best hacks that will help you get even more out of this. You can jump

00:46 ahead to the app that you like or come with me on the whole journey and learn some new tricks. Let's go. Let's start with Word. Once I've got Word open, you've got a Copilot icon down at the bottom right here, and you'll see when that opens there is this allow editing option. That is where you want to be in order to be able to use this agentic capability. If you want to switch back to just chatting side by side, select

01:10 that arrow and choose chat only. But we've been there, done that. We're going to have a look at the editing capability. So, my scenario here is that I'm working with training engagements. People email me and say, "Hey, we'd like to run some Copilot training for our organization. How does this work?" And what I'm going to do here is use the agent capability to create a template for me and then also populate that

01:33 template. So, what I'm doing here is creating a workflow that is like an intake form of some kind. So, the first one I just wanted to show you is being able to use this to create something from blank, but the value I get out of it is actually more the editing and working with things that are partly done. So, we're going to go through a couple of different things. So, my first prompt here is that I want it to create a templated table of some kind. And you'll

01:58 see as it creates this on the side of the screen that it comes up in this pale blue sort of color because I'm in control about whether I want it or not, and then I can choose to say yes, I want to accept that or not. So we've got the contact details organizing organ training topic preferred format. Okay. So all of this is fine, but this is a bit much. So what we're going to do is

02:20 say simplify to just uh let's say five core rows and then expand then expand contact details so that uh name, company, role title email and phone are separate

02:45 rows. Okay. So now what I'm doing is asking it to make an edit. And this is something that even if you didn't start from creating it in the first place, any Word document you've got, you can ask Copilot on the side to make these change it and edit for you. How good is this? So now we've got name, company, role, email, phone, and then training audience, goal. Right. So we're now down

03:06 to sort of a nice core intake form. And I'm going to select done. It's giving me a little bit extra here, but I don't want that, so we'll just get rid of that. And then I can go ahead and save that as my training template. All right, we've got our template. If you're watching closely, you might notice that I've deleted email and phone there. It's just easier for demo purposes to do it that way. So what I've

03:30 got here now is an email that has come in from somebody describing what they want in terms of training. And you'll see that it's all quite unstructured. There's a list of text and things here, and there are key pieces of information that I need to be able to extract from this email in order to fill this form. So if you've got any kind of workflow that involves taking something like this, a structured table, and filling it

03:53 from You can do it from a PDF, from an unstructured email, then this is how you can do that. So, what we can do here is come across and say "Fill this form." I'm going to misspell a little bit there. Using And then I'm going to use that forward slash key to bring up the recent documents that I've been working with. You can see that we've actually got emails, Word documents, Excel files, all sorts of things in here. But, what

04:15 you can actually do if you want to find a specific thing is start typing it. So, this one was training request, and there it is. So, I'm just going to select that, hit enter, and watch it go. And what it's going to do is read through that email and fill all of that information into the form. Now, I could also ask it to remove that information to collect column once we're done, because we don't

04:38 necessarily need that to be there. We'll give it a second here. So, this is going to come through. See, it's actually even reformatting it as it goes, filling in all of the details. Looking good so far. Again, in the blue, so I've got the option to decide whether I'm ready to keep it when it's done. Excellent. So, you can see

05:00 that I can use that edit mode to create things from scratch or to populate things from other content, or I could type other things in there like remove that column or change anything else around. Completely able to edit in natural language in Word. Let's take a look at something a little more complex. I've got here a fictional statement of work, which is for training services for a company that just wants AI for finance

05:24 training services. And so, you'll see here that we have got a scope of work that talks about AI for finance. So, let's say this company said, "Actually, we would also like to extend this to our sales team." So, what I'm going to do is say the client now wants the same for their sales team, and then we can extend extend the end date to 31st of July, because we're going to extend this. So,

05:50 you'll see here this goes through to the 20th of June. So, we're going basically going to expand it. So, you'll see what happens here is the scope of work AI for finance. As it goes through, it will work through the whole document and make changes. So, if you do something like this, you'll see it making the changes as it works through each one. So, we can see we've got some changes up here. So, first of all, it has changed finance and sales. So, it's edited that

06:16 in there. It has now put in the new date, the new scape of scope of work AI for finance and sales. And so, we've got all of those things in there. Now, it's mixed it up a little bit. So, we can go through and ask it to sort of make it separate into different sections. But again, you'll see how sophisticated this is. This isn't just like a search and replace to go through and say, "Oh, at

06:39 change finance to finance and sales." which is what you could do before all of this. But I'm asking it to understand the content of the document and go through and actually make all of those changes. And you'll see that it's made a bunch of different edits that you can go through. So, it's even changed that heading at the top there. And I would go through and check all of those things and say it's done. So, this is something that mimics real things that I'm doing

07:02 where I need to make changes that are almost repetitive or that I can describe. And the amount of time it takes to do it here compared to actually going through and editing and making all those changes myself is amazing. So, any other workflow you've got like that where you want to populate documents or change things or rewrite things, you can do that in here. The other very cool

07:24 thing that you can do is edit just a part of the document. So, let's say I take that part and say, "Rewrite this as an executive summary." Now, you'll notice I've just said rewrite this. It knows what this is because it is completely contextually aware of where your cursor is and what you've got highlighted on the screen. So, if you've been using Copilot in Word before, we used to do this kind of on the canvas in

07:47 a little sort of sparkle icon, but this allows you to just work entirely side by side asking it to make changes, and if you want to focus in on a specific area, it understands where you are in the document. It's pretty cool, huh? Let's take a look at this agent mode in Excel. So, again, we open it from the Copilot icon at the bottom, and we're working in this allow editing mode. You can switch