Drafting and validating strategy briefs with Copilot in Word

Using Copilot in Word is best suited for working with the active document you have open to create content or refine existing content. You can open a document you've already created or you can use Copilot to help in a new blank document. It works just the same. On the bottom right-hand side of the screen with your document open, click the Copilot icon. Here's the prompt. I'm going to make sure I'm in edit mode so Copilot can make direct changes to my document. I'll click this down arrow, yours might be in chat-only mode, in which Copilot can answer questions about your document and can summarize it, but it can't make direct changes. So I'm going to go ahead and make sure Allow Editing is turned on. From here, I can type my prompt. Draft a one-page strategy brief, recommending how our team should expand into the small business market next quarter. It's for our leadership team to make a decision, so the tone should be professional and confident. Base it on the findings in the attached files. Include these sections, objective, key findings, recommendation, risks, and next steps. Use bracketed placeholders for any numbers you can't verify from the referenced files. This prompt uses those four pillars. We have a goal, that is, drafting the strategy brief. We have context, it's for the leadership team to make a decision. We have source files that I'm going to include in just a moment, and I'm also including the expectations. I'm telling it exactly what I want. Include these sections, objective, key findings, et cetera. I'm adding one more technique. This is to use bracketed placeholders for any numbers you can't verify from the reference file. This is a technique to avoid Copilot from making up numbers, that is hallucinating. I'm telling it that if it can't find any numbers, don't make something up, instead use a placeholder so that I can go in and add it later. I'll add my files, I'll hit the forward slash, here's one of them, market research, and I'll include another file because I can in fact include up to 20 files to use as sources. Here's my sales pipeline. You'll notice one of them's a Word document, the other one is an Excel file, so they can be different documents. I'll send my prompt and we'll see what it comes up with. Copilot's finished and I can watch it being made right before my eyes. If I don't like anything, I can always click undo here at the bottom of the screen, but I'm going to click done. Something else that makes it easy to fact check is you can look and scroll and read Copilot's reasoning. You can see exactly what it's doing to your document, including what it's adding and the things that it's including. In fact, here, it's telling me what it put into these placeholders for me. There's some next steps that it can do, and it's telling me that, or I can describe what I want to edit. So I can see that this has given me a great starting point. At this point, we can use Copilot to further refine text by having a conversation. I can highlight any text I want, and in the pop-up window, I can click Edit with Copilot. From here, I can auto-rewrite it again, I can make it shorter, I can structure and refine it, or I can use a prompt and describe the change that I want. I can even include source content here also. Make these sentences shorter. It's all done, and again, it changed right before my eyes, and it only acted on the paragraph that I highlighted. It's assumed that you're gonna go through and fact-check everything, even the items that you've asked Copilot to fact-check. It's important to remember here that this final document is going to come from you. But if I wanted to do a final once-over before I go in and make this truly mine, I might add a prompt like the following. Check every figure and claim against the reference documents. Output here any area where the data differs or is still a placeholder. Identify areas where the document needs more evidence or stronger arguments. Use bullet points in your responses. This way, I can add in some more fact-checking and I can figure out where I need to make this more detailed. Now, I don't need a dissertation about this, so that's why I used the last paragraph where I said, use bullet points in your responses. I just want some quick details that I can add to this document if it needs it. Now, because this is an in-context conversation, it already knows which reference documents I'm talking about. There's one more thing I'm going to change before I send this prompt, and I wanted to show you that you can change the model that Word uses. If I click the three dots, I can choose the model that Copilot is going to use in its response. By default, it's set to auto. And 99% of the time, that's great for creating drafts, rewriting texts, and answering questions. However, in this case, I'm specifically asking Copilot to do some fact-checking for me. So I want it to take its time and really check deeply. So I'm going to change this answer to Think Deeper. It's going to take longer, that's the trade-off, but I'm going to get better, more accurate results. I'll change it to Think Deeper, and now I'll send my prompt. It's all done. Now, I sped this up for you, but it's worth mentioning, because I chose that Think Deeper option, it really only held it up by about two minutes, so I wanted to throw that out there. But here's what it's doing. It's showing me everything that it's verifying. Now, I will still go verify this by myself, but this is a great place to start. It's telling me everything that I wanted, and I might need to fix in this document. If you wanna find out what that Think Deeper option is really doing for you, a great thing that I like to do is run the same prompt using the auto method, clearing the chat, starting all over again, and running it using Think Deeper. This is going to give you a great estimate of how much longer it takes and what a different kind of answer you're going to get. So we started with a blank, empty page and look what Copilot did for us. I can now go through and make this document completely mine before sending it off to the leadership team.