Home / Books and paperwork / Job 14
Turn a brain dump into a document, and a CSV into a chart for a client
Getting from messy thoughts to a clean document, or from raw numbers to a chart, takes longer than the work itself.
What the agent did
Steve Knutson, a consultant who works with SharePoint, tracked one workday to see whether Copilot actually saved him time. To write a document, he typed his thoughts as rough paragraphs, selected them, and asked Copilot in Word to rewrite them more clearly. Later a client wanted six months of usage numbers for a board meeting, so he exported the data as a spreadsheet file and had Copilot in Excel make a chart, a trend, and a summary table. He says both took a fraction of the usual time, though Copilot was less useful for building slides from scratch.
What the owner still checks
Check the chart against the raw numbers before it goes to a client or board. He also notes Copilot double-booked meetings when it suggested times, so don't let it schedule without checking.
Give it your real notes or a real file to start from. With a thin request it can invent details, so read every claim before it goes out.
Try this job
Starter prompt written by Agents 101. This was written for this guide. It is not a quote from the original post. Change the names, amounts, and accounts so they match you before you send it.
In Word: "Rewrite the selected paragraphs as a clear, well-organized section for [audience]. Keep every fact I wrote, don't add new ones, and keep it under [length]." In Excel, with the data as a table: "Make a line chart of [measure] by month, describe the trend in two sentences, and add a summary table by [category]."
Source
steveknutson.blog (opens in a new tab), dated .
Added to Agents 101 on . Any dollar amounts are what the original person said. We did not check them.