Tag: AI

Let’s be honest for a second.

You’ve been using Microsoft Office for years. Maybe decades. You know how to bold text. You know Ctrl+Z is undo and you use it approximately 400 times a day. You’ve survived Excel formulas that looked like ancient Sanskrit, PowerPoint transitions that belonged in a 2003 corporate fever dream, and Word documents that somehow changed formatting by themselves in the middle of the night.

You’ve been through a lot together, you and Office.

And now, Microsoft has added AI to the whole thing. It’s called Copilot, and it lives inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams — basically everywhere you already spend your working hours. Which is everywhere.

So what does that actually mean for you? Good question. Let’s get into it.

Word: Your New Writing Partner Who Never Sighs at Your Drafts

Let’s start with Word, because almost everyone uses it and almost everyone has a complicated relationship with the blank page.

Drafting from scratch? Don’t. Describe what you need and let Copilot write a first draft. Not because you’re lazy — because a first draft to react to is always faster than a first draft from nothing. You’ll edit it, reshape it, make it yours. But you’re not starting from zero, and that matters more than people admit.

Rewriting existing content? Select any paragraph, right-click, and ask Copilot to make it shorter, more formal, more casual, or just “better.” It’s surprisingly good at adjusting tone. Handy for when you need to send the same information to your CEO and to a client and they absolutely cannot sound identical.

Summarizing long documents? Ask Copilot to summarize whatever’s open. It reads the whole thing and gives you the key points. This is particularly useful when someone sends you a 20-page document with the note “let me know your thoughts by EOD” at 4:47pm.

The secret move: Ask it to improve your writing, not just change it. There’s a difference between “make this shorter” and “make this clearer and more direct.” Try both. See what happens.

Excel: Finally, Formulas in Human Language

Okay. Excel formulas. Let’s talk.

I love Excel. I also know that a non-trivial percentage of the working population opens a cell, starts typing a formula, makes one small error, and then stares at a #REF! error for 20 minutes while slowly questioning their life choices.

With Copilot in Excel, you can now describe what you want in plain English and it will write the formula for you.

“Show me the total sales for Q3 where the region is ‘North’.” “Calculate the average time between order date and delivery date.” “Flag any rows where the value in column C is more than 20% higher than the previous row.”

It writes the formula. You paste it in. It works. You feel like a genius. Nobody has to know.

But it goes further than formulas. You can ask Copilot to:

• Spot trends in your data — “What patterns do you see in this dataset?”
• Suggest charts — “What’s the best way to visualize this data?”
• Clean up messy data — ask it to identify duplicates, inconsistencies, or blank cells
• Generate new columns based on logic — “Add a column that categorizes sales as High, Medium or Low based on value”

The spreadsheet isn’t going to build itself. But with Copilot, it’s getting a lot closer.

The secret move: Don’t just ask it to do things. Ask it to explain things. If you’ve inherited a spreadsheet full of formulas someone else wrote (we’ve all been there, and we’ve all had feelings about it), ask Copilot to explain what each formula does. Instant clarity. No archaeology required.

PowerPoint: Slides From Nothing, In Seconds

PowerPoint has a special place in the circle of office suffering. There is nothing quite like the experience of being told you need to “put together a quick presentation” — which, in the history of work, has never once been quick.

Copilot can now generate an entire presentation from a prompt. Or, better yet, from a Word document you’ve already written. You feed it the content, tell it roughly what you need, and it builds slides — with layouts, titles, bullet points, and even suggested images.

Is it perfect? No. Will you need to tweak it? Yes. Will it still save you 45 minutes of dragging text boxes around and trying to remember whether your brand color is #0050A0 or #0052A3? Absolutely.

You can also use it to:

• Summarize a presentation that someone sent you (because sometimes you receive a 40-slide deck and need to understand it in 3 minutes)
• Add a new slide on a specific topic without breaking the existing formatting
• Rewrite speaker notes so they actually sound like something a human would say out loud, rather than a bullet-pointed anxiety spiral

The secret move: After generating slides, ask Copilot: “What’s missing from this presentation?” It will often flag gaps in logic, missing sections, or points that need more supporting data. It’s like having a second pair of eyes that’s read the brief and isn’t being polite about it.

Outlook: Because Email is Still Somehow the Core of Everything

Email. The immortal, indestructible, unstoppable communication format that was supposed to die approximately fifteen times and never did.

Copilot in Outlook does a few things that will make your inbox slightly less of a horror show.

Email summaries: Long email thread with 24 replies and you have no idea what’s happening? Ask Copilot to summarize it. It pulls out the key decisions, open questions, and action items. You’re caught up in 30 seconds. You’re welcome.

Draft replies: You can highlight an email and ask Copilot to draft a reply for you. Give it the key point you want to make and the tone you want to strike, and it handles the rest. This is especially useful for emails you’ve been putting off because they require a delicate touch (read: the ones you’ve had sitting in your inbox for four days with a little mental sticky note that says “ugh”).

Coaching mode: There’s a feature that reviews your draft before you send it and gives feedback on tone, clarity, and whether it might land the wrong way. Think of it as a friend who reads your passive-aggressive email before you send it and gently says “maybe don’t.”

The secret move: Use Copilot to schedule follow-ups. Ask it to draft a follow-up email to send in three days if you haven’t heard back. Copy it into a draft, schedule the send. Never forget a follow-up again. Never lose a deal because it fell through a crack. Very satisfying.

Teams: The Meeting Took Two Hours and You Need It to Be Four Bullet Points

Teams has arguably the most dramatic AI upgrade of the whole suite.

Copilot in Teams can transcribe your meetings in real time, take notes, summarize the discussion, and generate a list of action items — all automatically, while you’re actually present in the meeting and paying attention like a normal human being.

After the meeting, you can ask it things like:

• “What did we decide about the budget?”
• “Were there any open questions that didn’t get resolved?”
• “What did Marco say about the timeline?” (Perfect for when Marco is a fast talker and you lost the thread somewhere around minute 47.)

You can even ask it to catch you up if you joined a meeting late. Which, you know. Happens sometimes. To some of us. More than we’d like to admit.

The secret move: At the end of a meeting, before you hang up, ask Copilot to generate a recap you can paste directly into an email to all attendees. Meeting summary + action items + owners + deadlines, ready to send. Your team will think you’ve become incredibly organized. You have not. You’ve become incredibly smart about using tools.

The Stuff That Works Across All of Them

A few principles that apply no matter which Office app you’re in:

Be specific about tone. “Formal” and “professional” are not the same thing. “Casual” and “friendly” are not the same thing. Tell it exactly what register you need.

Give it context. The more it knows about the situation, the better the output. “Write an email” is a weak prompt. “Write an email to a long-term client explaining a 2-week delay on their project, keeping the tone reassuring and taking responsibility without being dramatic” is a great prompt.

Iterate, don’t regenerate. If the first output isn’t quite right, don’t just click “regenerate” and hope for different results. Tell it specifically what to change. “Make the introduction shorter.” “The second paragraph is too formal.” “Add a sentence acknowledging the inconvenience.” You’ll get there faster.

Use it to think, not just to produce. Ask it questions. “What am I missing here?” “Is there a better way to structure this?” “What objections might someone have to this proposal?” AI is a thinking partner, not just a text generator.

Coming Up: The Deep Dives

This is the overview — the “here’s what’s possible” article. But we’re just getting started.

In the coming articles, I’ll be going deep on each of these apps individually: specific features, real use cases, the tricks that actually save time versus the ones that look impressive in demos and are useless in real life. We’ll also look at specific job roles and workflows — what AI in Office looks like for someone in finance versus someone in marketing versus someone who just wants to get through their inbox and go home on time.

So bookmark this. Or don’t — just Google “Shay AI Office” in three weeks and it’ll probably come up. (That’s SEO confidence right there.)

Pro Tip: The Sidebar Is Your Secret Weapon

Here’s something that most people overlook entirely, and it’s kind of mind-blowing once you start using it.

In Microsoft 365 apps, Copilot lives in a sidebar — a persistent panel on the right side of your screen that you can open at any time, in any document, and just… talk to. You don’t have to use the inline features. You don’t have to right-click or navigate menus. The sidebar is just there, ready, like a very competent colleague who never leaves their desk.

You can have it summarize what you’re working on, ask it questions about the document, get it to generate something new, or just think out loud with it while you work.

And if you’re in the Google Workspace universe instead — Docs, Sheets, Slides, Gmail — the same principle applies with Gemini in the sidebar. Google has their own version of this, and with Gems (custom AI personas you can configure for specific tasks), you can set up a sidebar assistant that’s already tuned for your specific workflow before you even open a document.

Whether it’s Copilot or Gemini, the sidebar is where the real day-to-day magic happens — not in flashy demos, but in the quiet five seconds where you ask a quick question and get back exactly what you needed.

I’m going to write a whole dedicated article about using the sidebar effectively — for both Microsoft and Google — including how to set up Gemini Gems for specific roles and workflows. It’s worth its own deep dive. Stay tuned.