Okay, it never went away, but we are piloting some versions of Microsoft Copilot that are embedded in their apps, like Excel, Word, and Teams among others. This has been going on for just a few weeks, so there are ups and downs, and limitations we are discovering.
First off, it's nice to have Copilot inside the app you are working on so it can read your document and respond. A colleague sent over some survey results for a survey she gave last year. It had 175 responses and I did not have time to comb through them all. I exported the results to Excel and asked it to summarize each column of answers. It was quick and easy, plus it gave me some wording I used in my presentation that included the survey data!
There have been other times when I've asked Copilot to summarize some data or help me to collate it, but it doesn't like the headings. Yesterday when I was working with an Excel report from ALEKS (our math support platform) it refused to do anything until I fixed the headings and spacing, which I refused to do haha
Now when I open up Word, Copilot is already prompting me. If I want to write a reference letter for a colleague I can easily ask Copilot to help me write that letter. Of course, that's just one example and I'm excited to try out other ideas.
