I can’t wait until AI is incorporated into Microsoft Office. Why? Because it will make me and most of my Not for Profit clients so much more productive.
There’s been a lot of chatter about AI or Artificial Intelligence lately. In fact, if you haven’t tried ChatGPT or DALL-E (or the many other versions available) yet, you’re really missing out on some very productive tools.
While the “techies” are using them to help write software code and design user interfaces, I have been using them for:
- Writing draft outlines for webinar presentations
- Generating the first draft of some of my “IT in Plain” English articles (not this one, BTW)
- Vendor research (without searching through all the paid ads)
- Finding published statistics (make sure you ask it for the source too).
- Creating original graphics for an article. However, it doesn’t always work out, as you can see in my poorly drawn AI-generated image below.
Image: AI-generated image of Artificial Intelligence making office work more productive.
Why I can’t wait until AI is incorporated into Microsoft Office
Despite all that AI can do already, I can’t wait until AI is incorporated into Microsoft Office and…it’s coming soon! If you are not aware, Microsoft was one of the original investors in Open AI, and recently they poured another US$10 billion into this work.
Besides adding it to the Bing search function and developer tools, they have greater ambitions to introduce it to the full Office suite, including Word and Excel. What does this mean for you and your Not for Profit employees?
While the future functions have not been confirmed, I can picture a new Microsoft world where AI is used for a number of time-saving tasks. Here are a few ideas:
- Writing Word documents even better:
- Recommending Table of Contents or First Drafts based on your topic and in your personal writing style (or that of your boss!)
- Recognising that you (or a colleague) wrote a document on a similar topic and suggesting the reuse of information
- Recommending different words or structures to make the document more understandable to your identified audience
- Building templates or standardised paragraphs (like the About Our Organisation section) with just word prompts
- Identifying photos, videos or links to other docs that may be relevantly used in your document.
- Suggesting improvements to make it more searchable or better for Search Engine Optimisation (if written for a website)
- Simplifying the use of Excel:
- Performing tasks with plain English prompts like, “add column A to column B and change the colour of the cell to red if a negative number.”
- Training it to do time-consuming tasks like data clean-up once a month, i.e. “identify any members that have the same birthday and phone number and merge data.”
- Simplifying data migration from one system to another (will save a lot of pain and money!)
- Comparing data or numbers between two files with word prompts: “highlight where data has changed between File A and File B.”
- Identifying trends in large amounts of data, including forecasts like for budgets
A word of caution:
While we don’t know yet if these types of functions will be available in Microsoft Office, some of them are already available in ChatGPT and other tools.
My concern now is that staff members may use these publicly available options and inadvertently overshare confidential corporate information (including Privacy Act data), with open-source software that’s designed to absorb and reuse information given to it.
So, beware until safer options are available within the Microsoft suite.
Tammy Ven Dange is a former charity CEO, Not for Profit Board Member and IT Executive. Today she helps NFPs with strategic IT and data decisions.
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