Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe Now
Recently, I was preparing a CLE presentation. One of the topics involved using Microsoft Word to create a table of authorities. I thought this would be a perfect use case for an AI tool. A completed brief is a closed universe for the AI to review, containing all the necessary information to complete the task. The AI software should be able to take that information and produce a finalized table, right? Not quite.
As with most AI, there are some positives to note, but the final product always requires lawyer intervention. What was interesting is that the tool can teach you how to use the tool without leaving the tool. This article will show you how to use Microsoft’s Copilot to learn how to use Microsoft Word.
What is Copilot?
Copilot is Microsoft’s AI tool, built into Office 365 products. You can access it through the toolbar in Word. Look for the Copilot logo and click on it. A panel appears with an area to “Message Copilot.” Type your question into this box and press enter or click the send icon. Copilot will analyze your question and provide a response.
It’s like an enhanced Help menu
Word has a great built-in Help menu. One of the best uses of the Help menu is to search for a tool or feature you are trying to use and find it quickly. For example, one thing I do often is watermark a document to show it is a draft. Simply search for “watermark” in the Help menu, and Word will show you where that menu item appears (Insert | Watermark).
The Help menu is fast. It will generally help you find something you already know exists but can’t remember the location.
Copilot is useful if you want to know more about a feature or how to do something that takes multiple steps.
Using Copilot
Click Copilot in the menu bar. The Copilot window appears. You are presented with a “Message Copilot” box. Here you could type the word “watermark,” but without more context Copilot isn’t really going to help you much. Instead, type a question like “What is the purpose of a watermark in a document, and how do I use it?” Press enter or click the little send icon and watch Copilot respond.
Your response may vary, but Copilot told me the purpose of a watermark along with several example use cases. It also told me how to add a watermark using the built-in templates, and it gave me instructions for how to create a custom watermark, including adding an image or logo to the document. It also told me how to remove a watermark.
In addition, Copilot offered a step-by-step guide to inserting a watermark: “Just tell me what you want it to say or look like!”
The responses provided by Copilot can be overwhelming. To help, Copilot gives suggestions for next logical questions that you can click on and put them in the message window. Modify or click send to continue the conversation.
Benefits of Copilot
One of the main benefits is that I never had to leave Word and do an internet search. Copilot did all the work in the sidebar of the same program.
The instructions appeared alongside my document. It is a bit strange to have the program teach how to use the program. It is a bit like an over-eager intern, where the tool is trying to tell you everything it knows and persuade you to come back and use it instead of all its competitors, all in 30 seconds. But if you take a minute to read through the responses, you will start to see the patterns of how the AI tool works and that it can be helpful.
As AI continues to be integrated into, well, everything, it is important to understand how it works and where it can be useful. Using Copilot with a document you created to remember how to insert or remove a watermark is a great way to start to understand how the tool works.
Table of authorities
If you are still curious about using Copilot to draft a table of authorities, try it. Copilot provided good instructions for how to use Word’s built-in tools to mark citations and enter the table. It didn’t automatically complete the work for me, though it tried. There was still a good deal of manual work to be done. That said, I did try it on a Mac. The Windows version might work differently. Make sure you leave the normal amount of time to prepare the table and don’t rely on the tool to speed up the process the first time.•
__________
Wilson is an attorney with Adler Attorneys in Noblesville. In addition to practicing law, he helps manage the day-to-day technology operations of the firm. He writes about legal technology at sethrwilson.com and is a frequent speaker on the subject.
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.