85: Transcribing Online Videos

Posted on July 18, 2025 by ewand

We’re all busy. Who has time to watch training videos, recordings of online conferences and the like, without skipping the blah blah and getting to the point?

What if we could use cutting edge technology to give us more time to do the things we really want to be doing?

Some online videos have a transcript already published – on YouTube, for example, it’s an option hidden in the description, if the publisher allows it. Clicking the Show transcript button will then display a text stream of what was said, with timestamps alongside.

It’s not searchable, other than by using the browser to try and find text on the page. In the case of YouTube, though, it’s a handy way of jumping straight to a keyword in the video.

If you can get the transcription, you can get it summarised. Why bother wading through hours of corporate chiff-chaff if you could get the tasty bullets extracted for you?

But that’s not what we want.

Take One – the live video

Live broadcasts don’t publish the transcript; clearly, they can’t know what is going to be said and when. Maybe they’ll have live subtitling but that’s tricky to do anything with until after the event is over.

“As live” stuff like corporate events such as Microsoft’s recent MCAPS Start for Partners often don’t make the transcript available ahead of time. Watching these kinds of things in real time, there is one natty technique to get a transcript, even though it does have some shortcomings.

Using Teams, go to the Calendar view and start a new instant meeting…

Once joined, you’ll be the only participant and also the meeting organiser. Now Share the browser tab that is displaying the live video with your meeting; share just the window and make sure you’re including sound (so the sound from the window is getting picked up by Teams).

Now, you’ll be able to Start transcription and Teams will record everything that’s being said.

The downside is that everything is noted as coming from you (since it won’t know who is speaking in the real video) and some jargon might be messed up repeatedly. When the meeting is finished, you should be able to look at the Recap feature and locate the transcript.

Download the text to a Word doc and you’ll be able to do some simple editing like find/replace for common mistakes (in the MCAPS event, “FY20 6” cropped up instead of FY26, or “SME and C” instead of SME&C), and maybe even add in the names of speakers at different points if you know them.

The transcript can be fed to your favourite AI tool later to summarise it. More on that later.

Take Two – the replay of video

Other training vids etc might be published on-demand, and if they avoid sharing a transcript too, it’s still possible to use the same technique as above to capture what’s being said. You might even be able to alter the playback speed so you can capture the text without investing the actual time to watch the video …

Chances are that 4x playback will be a bit too fast for the transcriber to catch its gist. Stick to 1.5 – 2x and marvel at your own genius.

Take Three – they published the transcript!

Oh, frabjous day! If your video of choice does have a published transcription, it’s likely that it will have correct speaker names, and the creator may have tidied up any mistakes in capturing jargon or abbreviations.

In the case of the Microsoft MCAPS Start event referenced earlier, they did share the transcript as a .VTT file, a format used to define subtitle displays so it’s very chopped up and has timeline information too. Not easy to read, particularly, but we can overcome that.

Click the … option on the control bar and you may see Transcript options; in this case, you can search for a keyword and jump directly to that point in the video, or click the little arrow to download a copy to a VTT file. It’s just a text file that can be opened in Word or Notepad if you insist; it would be worth saving it to your PC and renaming it to something.txt.

Feeding the Copilot

In this example, however you’ve arrived at a transcript file, lucky subscribers can use M365 Copilot to make it summarise the information. ChatGPT would surely do similar, and as long as the video is in the semi-public domain, there’s no worry about sharing all your secrets with OpenAI.

Here’s an example prompt for Copilot:

Using the attached transcript, generate a well-formatted word Document with 1. 2-page summary in short sentences and bullet points, paying particular attention to key announcements (particularly on program changes and investments) and any data points being used, 2. A 4-page summary of the key themes, any calls to action and take-aways from the content. 3. the actual text of the transcript ordered neatly into paragraphs of English, highlighting speaker names in bold.

Paste this prompt into copilot.microsoft.cloud and click the + icon to upload the .TXT or .DOCX transcription file you have already saved.

Give it a short while and you should get the document ready to view…

Using this prompt gives a short bulleted version, but asking Word to generate a longer summary in Copilot within the app might also provide a useful bit of readable text at the top, too.

You can tweak the level of detail with the drop-down menu on the lower left fo the Copilot option in Word. Selecting “Detailed” in this example will give a 2-3 page summary of the hour-long transcript, well formatted and easy to read.

Result! 😊

#79: Do you bother taking notes?

Posted on June 6, 2025 (Updated June 4, 2025) by ewand

When you’re in a meeting or even a phone call, do you write everything down? Whether you listen attentively and then record a summary of events later (mentally or in other form), or you furiously annotate what is happening in real time, it’s a matter of preference which one works.

Some say the act of writing notes help cement things in your memory, like doing revision at school where you’d write a summary of what you were supposed to learn. Or is note taking a mental distraction where you concentrate on the notes more than the nuance of what is happening in the meeting? Or maybe just live in the presence, wing it, and try to remember what occurred later.

Linear people like writing a list of bullets, grabbing key points, comments or decisions as things flow. Other, more visual types might prefer a mind map (or are they just doodling?) The Cornell method prescribes a way of taking notes during the meeting, then revisiting them to take cues and action items, with a summary for later recap. There are many online guides explaining different approaches – in truth, you’ll probably need to try them and see which works best for you.

Whichever one you land on, it’s worth making sure you actually read the notes back – or like some computer programming languages, you’ll end up with write-only notes: they might have made sense at the time, but even their author could look back later and have no idea what they mean.

Perhaps the best way to run a meeting (as well as having an agenda, not making it too long, having everyone stand up to keep them attentive, etc) is to nominate one or two people to take notes and circulate them after the meeting, rather than have everyone taking their own. That deals with the “oh, I’m taking notes on my laptop/phone” excuse too.

Digital Note Takers

If you’re prepared to pay money then there are many options for having an automatic note taker in your meeting; Microsoft pitches both Teams Premium and M365 Copilot as ways of making recordings or transcriptions of Teams meetings, and looking for topics, actions etc.

The idea is that you can go back into a meeting after the event and see a summary of what happened, with the ability to jump back to a specific point in the recording or transcription (so you can check the note-taker got the gist correctly). You’ll get a list of identified actions and who they’re assigned to.

There are pros and cons to Teams’ approach, though – the recording process is non-intrusive and the analytics takes place in the background, and all the data about the meeting is stored in the M365 tenant of the host.

It’s the organiser of the meeting, however, who normally gets to decide if it’s recorded or transcribed, and only (licensed) users within their organisation will get to see the summary. So, if you’re joining a customer meeting which they arranged, you get no auto-notetaking even if you have a Copilot license on your own tenant. If they share the transcript or recording with you, then you could feed it into Copilot (see Kat Beedim from CPS’s excellent process, repurposed in #47: Using Copilot for (consistent) meeting notes) but that won’t have the same fidelity as a full recording.

Un-Fathomable

Another approach besides having Teams or Zoom make the summary, is to use a 3^rd party agent which will do it for you. The market leader is probably Fathom, though there are plenty of other upstart alternatives.

Fathom works by being external to whatever the meeting platform is; you invite Fathom’s “notetaker” to your meeting and it shows up as an additional attendee. This means you may be able to join “your” Fathom to an external Zoom, Teams etc meeting, if the organiser allows attendees to bring additional invitees.

In a similar vein to Teams Premium, it lets you revisit your meeting with audio/video summary linked to extracted notes. You can also share meetings with colleagues who were not present, so they can review actions from events they missed.

One downside to Fathom’s approach is that it needs to be in the meeting to be able to work; that might be obvious, but it lacks the ability to consume a recorded meeting and generate notes after the event. If you forget to invite Fathom or start it recording, tough.

Also, the very appearance of “so-and-so’s Fathom notetaker” in a meeting which you’re organising can be a bit passive/aggressive; normally you’d be expected to ask if anyone minds you recording a meeting, but having someone bring their eavesdropping sidekick in unannounced can be a bit weird.

The media

Reverting to the old-school activity of people sitting in a meeting, listening, contributing and writing their own notes… what’s the best way to do that?

Pad and pen? OneNote on a laptop? ReMarkable tablet? Ah, that is another can of worms to be opened on another occasion.

#78: We don’t need no AI writin’

Posted on May 30, 2025 (Updated May 28, 2025) by ewand

The stated purpose of ToW in its 15-year history is to share and impart hopefully useful nuggets of information (interspersed with humorous nonsense). In truth, it’s still here because the process of writing it is enjoyable. And feedback seems to say that readers quite like it. The banner images are generated by Microsoft Designer but the rest is 100% hand crafted.

Even 2 or 3 years ago, most people would be astounded at how effectively “machines” could conjure up written prose. AI tools like ChatGPT or Copilot can do a surprisingly good job of generating text, but it’s never all that interesting to read – like the LinkedIn post that starts “Excited to share that…”.

Generative AI tools are good at producing dry, factual text in the same way that nutritional supplements can give you everything you might need to survive. But Huel is never going to rival a Michelin-starred dining experience.

Generation and Summary

Reading stories like how Satya Nadella manages his day can be part inspirational and part alarming. He has Copilot give him a precis of all his emails, actions and the likes, but also summarizes podcasts rather than have him listen to them. Why bother watching a movie when you can read a review? Why read a book when you can find out what happens on Google? Sometimes the journey is worth even more than getting to the destination.

Copilot lets you summarize web pages and even YouTube videos, if you can’t find the time to watch.

The danger of these kinds of services is that people will stop reading, watching or listening to content as it was originally produced, because it saves them time and effort. Fine, if someone sends you a dull business proposal when all you want is the tl;dr. Given that most corporate documents and emails are tediously written and poorly constructed, that’s fine. Let one person use AI to generate 10 pages of fluff from a few bullet points, only for its reader to reverse the process by feeding into a summarizing machine.

Is it time to re-evaluate how we read and write? The means of acquisition of information really has an impact on how it is understood and on how the recipient decides if it matters. As a reflection of this realisation that the telling of a story is every bit as important as the story itself, Microsoft has recently launched a limited-distribution printed magazine.

The first “Spring 2025” issue of Signal magazine has tips on what to do in the Seattle area, a retrospective look at some of Microsoft’s milestones in its 50^th year, book recommendations as well as “5 things” type quickfire interviews with a bunch of business leaders. It’s refreshingly slow and hand-crafted.

Em and En in the spotlight

No, they’re not two extras from The Famous Five, rather em and en are typographical characters who also double up as handy words in a game of Scrabble. The “em” character (“—” ) is traditionally the same width as a capital M, and the “en” dash (“–”) is half the width of em and the same as a capital N. Historically they’re used in a variety of ways, and vary a bit between American English and British English.

Em dashes are often used in place of a colon or––to make a point––in place of parentheses. Though it’s common to not put spaces around an em dash, it is allowable as long as you it consistently. In Word, you can type an em dash by putting two hyphens next to another character, as long as you don’t use spaces.

En dashes are wider than hyphens but sometimes can be used in place of one, or even instead of em dashes (especially in British English writing). When replacing an em dash with an en, do use spaces – and Word generates an en.

The ChatGPT Hyphen

Why are we blathering about ems and ens given the topic is about AI writing? Well…

Using American-oriented genAI tools might give strange-looking phraseology, depending on your own reference point. Some users are saying that the “em” dash is a tell-tale of AI-generated content, and advising people to go through and remove from their text so they don’t look like they’re too lazy to write for themselves. Instafluencers are saying it, so it must be true.

Using, or not using, certain types of punctuation can be an emotive subject. Publishers may specify rules as to when each is acceptable; the UK Gov, for example, rules out using dashes for date or time ranges. The Grauniad says en is the way to go. Tip of the Week agrees: something – en – something is better than something––em—something, so that’s what is used.

There will be no argument.

Spotting AI content

There are various tools out there – Originality.AI, GPTZero, Quillbot and more – which look for common patterns in AI generated docs so you could spot if something is original or not. Handy for teachers marking homework, or office managers looking to see if their staff are being super-efficient or just cutting corners?

Ah. Refreshingly human.

#69: Thinking Deeply

Posted on March 28, 2025 by ewand

It’s a little over 47 years since the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy was first broadcast on the radio, followed by the publication of the written work the following year. It took the most powerful supercomputer, “Deep Thought”, 7.5 million years to come up with the Answer to the Ultimate Question.

Who knows in the modern era how long it would take? Things have changed a lot over the last 50 years, and surely Google et al could manage a reply quicker than that.

It seems that the answers to many important but previously impossible questions are only a moment’s search away.

A screenshot of a web page

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Copilot’s Getting Deeper

Microsoft quietly unveiled an additional feature to its main Copilot offering – i.e. the free, web thing or Copilot app on PC or mobile (as opposed to the paid-for Microsoft 365 offering, or any other app’s Copilot-branded functionality).

Go to copilot.ai and just below the prompt, select the drop-down to change the mode – with a single click on the flower-like icon (which is not at all like the OpenAI logo), you can get it to Think Deeper.

This feature uses the fairly recent o3-mini (high) model from OpenAI (which runs on Azure, don’t you know… well at least most of it does), giving additional insight into whatever you’re asking. It doesn’t take much longer to answer compared to the regular reply so you might just think about using it all the time for questions of moderate complexity. And it’s free.

ChatGPT itself has a “Deep Research” function which is available to paying users (Plus or Pro), and Microsoft has also unveiled a forthcoming “Researcher” capability that will be part of the Microsoft 365 Copilot commercial offering, alongside some deep reasoning stuff for agents built in Copilot Studio. It’s all getting really deep, man.

Wannabe Record Breakers

As well as Copiloting-everything (mostly based on top of OpenAI stuff), Microsoft has been looking further afield and building its own AI technologies. There’s still plenty of Ayy Eye noise coming from Redmond, and an AI Skills Fest virtual event starting in April is going to keep the foot on the gas.

It might have one of the more obscure Guinness World Records, too…

A group of people looking at a glass board

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Let’s not get too excited now, kiddies. There are plenty of strange records to aspire to.

#68: It’s all about the prompt

Posted on March 21, 2025 (Updated March 18, 2025) by ewand

When internet search engines took off in the mid 90s – remember Alta Vista? – and Google exploded into the public consciousness in the early 2000s, it became increasingly apparent that getting good search results were helped by being able to ask your question correctly.

Savvy searchers might use a combination of quotes and other “operators” to specify an exact phrase, or guide the search engine to include only certain terms or results from a particular website (such as site:tipoweek.com onenote). Google and Bing both tend to use the same operators (so, as Scott Hanselman would say, you could “Google with Bing”).

Prompting Today

A screenshot of a computer screen

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

When using some of the many AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini etc, you can get very relevant results by being quite specific in what you ask it to do. As an example, one of the best ToW banner images was created using Microsoft Designer with the prompt, “a serene image of a young boy sitting at an old laptop (with Windows 10) but lurking in the dark background is the grim reaper”

A child sitting in a chair with a computer

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Or, getting much more detailed, see Kat Beedim’s detailed 200+ word instructions to create consistently-formatted notes from meeting transcripts.

Being much more verbose and directional than you’d ever try in a regular search engine can give some quite remarkable results. The order of what you ask might vary the emphasis given to certain parts of the response, and the general advice is to be positive – i.e. ask for things you want, rather than telling it what you don’t want.

It seems that AI can suffer from a variant of Dostoevsky’s “White Bear Problem”; ie. Asking it not to do something increases the likelihood of doing it. Not long after Microsoft went big on Copilot and Designer, here’s one example when Copilot was asked to draw an image on a particular topic…

No photo description available.

The idea was to convey a background threat with those hooded figures, not the feeling that the poor girl was in imminent peril. The figures lurking in the background might be a mite less sinister if they weren’t armed, so clarification was called for…

No photo description available.

Maybe DALL-E 3 at that time was just fixated with firearms, or asking it not to do something was a step too far. We’ve gone from “some guns” to “pointing guns at her”. Hmmm.

No photo description available.

Trying the same prompt in Designer seemingly gets a little less gun-heavy now, but still has the odd one creeping in. Trying to be more explicit doesn’t appear to work… adding to the end of the prompt, “The sinister hooded figures are not carrying guns of any kind”.

You might think that instruction is simple enough, but no. It seems to be interpreted as “you want more guns? Gotcha”.

A person sitting at a desk with a computer

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

#61: Adios, Office!

Posted on January 24, 2025 (Updated January 30, 2025) by ewand

Microsoft is seemingly ditching it’s “Office” brand, which first appeared in 1990 to describe the now-familiar bundling of 3 apps – Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Along with numerous other apps and services being added to the family, for some time the company has been pushing the online version – Office 365 then Microsoft 365 – as the default. Despite this, there is still an on-premises, discrete licensed bundle of the latest apps – Office LTSC 2024 if you really must.

Users of M365 – either personal, family or corporate bundles – can go to office.com and sign in to access all the software, services and data associated with it. This has now been renamed to cloud.microsoft and the accompanying Office / Microsoft 365 app (which is really just a PWA, a web app hosted in what looks like a Windows application) is now Microsoft 365 Copilot, in the headlong rush to call everything Copilot even when it isn’t.

Somewhat confusingly, if the “Copilot for Microsoft 365” service isn’t available the following explanation is given on the support page for the app’s transition:

What about regions where Copilot is not available?

For regions without Copilot availability, the Microsoft 365 Copilot app will remove the Copilot tab from the Home screen across web, desktop, and mobile app endpoints. However, the app name and icon will remain the same as Microsoft 365 Copilot for branding consistency.

… so, it will still be called “Copilot” even if the actual Copilot functionality has been removed.

M365 Personal / Family subscriptions

As well as being corporate fodder, ~~Office~~ Microsoft 365 has had a consumer variant for a decade: Microsoft 365 Personal gets you a single user who can have up to 5 devices where you have the Office apps installed (as well as the use of web versions), 1TB of cloud storage in OneDrive, and you get Outlook.com email without any ads. The Family subscription is around 20% more expensive and gets you the same as Personal, but for up to 6 people.

Former Microsofties can receive M365 Family for free if they’re in the Alumni Association, and with membership being less than half the price for M365 on its own, it’s worth joining if you’re eligible. If you know someone who is a current Microsoft employee or who’s an Alumnus, they might be able to get you a Friends & Family login to the eCompany Store, which lets you buy activation codes for M365 Personal or Family at a significant discount. And here’s a trick: you can stack the codes (ie. buy 3 of them for less than the cost of a regular single year’s subscription, then just apply them all to your account to kick the renewal date forward into the long grass).

Speaking of cost, M365 Personal & Family have risen in price quite a bit recently; partly because they include a load of new AI features and those cloud-based GPUs don’t buy themselves.

Welcome Copilot Users!

At the same time as potentially naming something Copilot that isn’t, Microsoft has rolled out some basic Copilot capabilities for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family users. See here for the details of what’s included and how, though if you’re really not on board with all this AI nonsense, you can opt to stay on “M365 Family Classic”, which is the same as it was before without the Copilot and Microsoft Designer guff.

You’ll be shown lots of Copilot banners if you log in to any Office app with a M365 Personal subscription or the primary user of a Family one (only the owner of the subscription gets the extra sauce, at least for now). There are ways to disable it should you want to, though not everywhere – Outlook.com displays a banner at the top of every email offering to summarize it for you…

Predictably, the User forums are full of “HOW DO I SWITCH THIS OFF” type questions. The short version is you can’t; click the X on the right to dismiss the banner but you need to do that for every. single. email. Or just learn to live with it.

And Microsoft wouldn’t be true to form if branding and packaging was simple… there’s still Copilot Pro, which gives additional capacity or the paid-for Microsoft 365 Copilot addon to business Microsoft 365 subscriptions. And Copilot functionality in Business Applications, Security, GitHub and doubtless many more…

#57: Excel-lent Conditional Formatting

Posted on December 13, 2024 (Updated December 11, 2024) by ewand

A theme of previous ToWs has been that applications often have lots more functionality than users either know or care about enough to utilise. Two of the simplest yet most impactful ways of handling data in Excel (and in Google Sheets, LibreOffice / OpenOffice etc, which basically copied the functionality) is to create tables from data, and to use conditional formatting to help them stand out.

Select a block of data – and for the purposes of these examples, we’re going to use some sample sales data – and on the home tab, it’s a few clicks to Format as Table. Even if you don’t intend to use more advanced formulae and get into naming tables and ranges, just doing the simple formatting and declaring the top row as headers gives you great ability to sort and filter the data quickly.

If you’re lucky, the table may automatically interpret the contents of your data, too – like understanding date fields. As we’ll get to later, you can even sort and filter by the appearance and not just the actual contents.

Users working on data in Excel which is clearly tabular but has not been defined as a Table, should almost be considered criminals.

Conditional Formatting made easy

Back on the Ribbon, the neighbouring Conditional Formatting control lets you add more pop to an existing Table or any other data. Select whatever cells, columns or rows you want to apply it to, and on the flyout menu you’ll have access to hundreds of options to visually distinguish certain data.

For simple “how to” and a cheesy video, check out the help on Use conditional formatting to highlight information in Excel.

If you need to do stuff that’s more complex, there’s also the option to write a formula but it’s quite different to regular Excel formulae – and can take a bit of working out, especially if it’s more complex. See the “Use a formula…” further down that previous help page.

Fortunately, there’s an easier way if you’re a Copilot user (and if you’re not, Microsoft has started pushing a free 1-month trial – just make sure you put a reminder in your diary or you’ll fall into the trap of subscribing to stuff you might not want). Rather than trying to write a formula and figure out the logic of it, you can just ask Copilot and it will comply…

After it has been applied, you could edit the rule to change its range, tweak the formula or adjust the formatting by going to the Manage Rules option under the Conditional Formatting menu. Make sure the “Show formatting rules for:” filter is set to the right area so you’ll see this and any other rules which may apply.

These rules are very useful for highlighting things that stick out – like due date on a pipeline report which have now passed, or a number that’s radically out of kilter with all the others in an export from a credit card account. If you’re dealing with very large sheets of data, you could filter the view not just by the values but by the colours that your formatting has set:

… thus temporarily hiding any of the rows which are not of interest.

Finally, you can interrogate data within Copilot without having to mess about with filters and the like, for example:

To validate that this is actually true, a pivot table can show the data by different dimensions and allow totalling, sorting and filtering: in this case, sorting (descending) by the sum of all orders:

Pivot Tables are some of the best magic that Excel delivers; it’s been a while since they’ve featured in ToW – leave a comment if you think that needs addressing. See here for more examples of Copilot prompts in Excel.

#47: Using Copilot for (consistent) meeting notes

Posted on October 4, 2024 (Updated October 1, 2024) by ewand

“GenAI” like Copilot and ChatGPT has been evolving quickly over the last year or two, and the more experience people have in using it has also changed their approach. Just as providing better questions to get more accurate search queries from Google / Bing, getting the best results from Copilot or the like might depend on being specific enough with your questions.

Here’s a tip courtesy of Kat Beedim, Microsoft 365 MVP from Microsoft partner, CPS. Kat is using Copilot to summarise the output of a Teams meeting, in an alternative way to the built-in Copilot for Microsoft 365 method which generates a pretty decent summary (and was recently discussed in context of the OneNote integration). While the content is generally good, using the standard approach, you will likely get differing formats of notes from one meeting to the next, depending on what was said.

Kat’s approach is to download the transcript from a meeting that you’ve attended; this may be available to anyone who joined the meeting, even if the tenant hosting the meeting doesn’t itself have Copilot provisioned. In other words, if you have access to Copilot and you can get the transcript from a meeting (which you didn’t organise, maybe even one organised by a different company) then you can generate the meeting notes.

To see if the meeting was transcribed, go back to the Chat or the Recap from the meeting within Teams and you might be able to download the transcript (as a .DOCX file).

Save the transcript file to OneDrive in the same tenant where your Copilot for M365 is, and within a Copilot prompt you can reference it… if you go to Copilot (Work) and press “/” in a prompt, it will let you choose a file (or other source of data).

Kat has provided a very polite and detailed prompt for Copilot to generate meeting notes; by using the same prompt after every project or team meeting, the same format of notes will be preserved.

Copilot, please assist me in converting the attached /(start typing the file name to select it)
into detailed meeting minutes.

Here’s what I need:

1. Identify Key Sections: Break down the transcript into distinct sections: attendees, apologies, introductions, summary of concerns, previous actions discussed, further discussions, recommendations and actions, date of next meeting. Keep to that order.

2. Summarise Discussions: Provide a detailed summary of the discussions for each agenda item, capturing the main points and any consensus reached.

3. Highlight Decisions: Clearly state any decisions made, including the rationale behind them and any dissenting opinions if applicable.

4. List Action Items: Enumerate the action items that came out of the meeting, specifying the responsible party and the deadline for each task

5. Note Attendees: Include a list of attendees and their roles or titles, as well as any apologies for absence.

6. Format for Clarity: Use full sentences and paragraphs, tables, and bold text for emphasis where necessary to enhance readability. Do not use bullet points.

7. Review for Accuracy. Ensure that the minutes reflect an accurate and impartial record of the meeting, and make any necessary edits for clarity and conciseness. Please format the minutes in a professional and presentable manner. suitable for distribution to all meeting participants and for record-keeping purposes. Thank you.

You could also open the transcript directly in Word and enter the gist of the prompt above in Copilot within Word, though formatting is a bit nicer when done from the Copilot for M365 prompt. It might be possible some day to tell it to generate a new document using a set template, but that appears to be a manual process for now.

Feel free to have a play with the prompt to get the format and the answers you want; you have 2,000 characters to give your instructions so be as descriptive as you like.

Kat’s video demo is on Write meeting minutes with Copilot – YouTube.

#45: Copilot updates flying in

Posted on September 20, 2024 (Updated September 19, 2024) by ewand

Microsoft unveiled “Wave 2” of Copilot for Microsoft 365 earlier this week; if you haven’t seen the video, you can catch it here, or check out Teams guru and MVP Tom Arburthnot’s tl;dr summary of the key announcements and the demos.

BTW, if you are a Microsoft partner, you might have heard during MCAPS Start in July, that (woo-hoo!) Microsoft was going to give you some free Copilot licenses as part of the benefit of being in the partner program.

The latest Benefits Guide shows that Copilot goodness is indeed coming in January 2025, but it might be a bit less generous than expected… Basically, don’t bank on getting more than a handful of seats as part of the package, and if you don’t think Copilot gives you enough benefit to bother paying for it, then, well…

Talking of “what’s new” with Copilot, Microsoft veteran Malcolm Bullock has a thought-provoking explanation of what he means by “Nothing has changed but everything is new”.

Some of the stuff that was announced in the Wave 2 jamboree will be coming later this year, such as Copilot automatically prioritizing your emails in Outlook. Other pieces – the Narrative Builder in PowerPoint, for example, are here already.

The PowerPoint Copilot functionality is amazing. Give it a couple of lines of content and it will generate a whole load of slides by finding out information to flesh out your idea. If you’re an expert in an area then it might seem to give a glib, high-level overview with not-quite-correct images, but all of that can be tweaked and updated later.

Here’s an example:

… and literally a few moments later, it presented…

Not bad at all. At least it has a framework which could be used to flesh out stuff in more human detail.

While Copilot might have its most immediate use in helping to create content like images or writing documents/emails for you, there are other collaborative benefits too, some of which were covered in the announcement. As Malcolm says above, maybe we will need to tweak how we collaborate (using channels instead of chat for group discussions, for example) to properly harness the capabilities to good effect.

On asking Copilot in Edge to summarize the announcement page to less than 200 words, it offered:

· Copilot Pages: Introducing a dynamic, persistent canvas for AI collaboration, allowing teams to work together in real-time with AI-generated content.

· Enhanced Microsoft 365 Apps: Significant improvements in Teams, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Word, including new features like Copilot in Excel with Python for advanced data analysis.

· Copilot Agents: New AI assistants to automate and execute business processes, with an easy-to-use agent builder for creating custom agents.

· User Feedback and Updates: Over 700 product updates and 150 new features based on feedback from nearly 1,000 customers, improving performance and user satisfaction.

So there are lots and lots of new features coming, if not here already. Yay.

Meetings, transcripts and notes

One of the nicer new widgets that Copilot has brought recently is for putting meeting notes into OneNote. Previously, to record what happened in a meeting, you’d ask either Teams Premium or Copilot to generate some kind of notes, then copy/paste the text into OneNote alongside other stuff you might have jotted down yourself during the meeting.

Now, it’s made the process a whole lot easier – first, you need to be sure the meeting has been recorded or transcribed. If you go back to the Meeting inside Teams (look in the Chat node), you might see a Recap option which will give you the summary of what happened, along with actions that were discussed:

Now, go into OneNote, navigate to your existing notes page for a meeting (or create a new one) and go to Insert Meeting details. It will offer you a pane on the right side showing a selection of meetings from your calendar.

Previously, this would have copied just the bumph from Outlook like the date/time, subject and who the attendees were – useful as that is – but now has added a bunch more…

It’s a brilliantly useful way of adding some extra content to notes you might already be taking, or just to more easily organize notes and follow up actions from within OneNote rather than grubbing about in Teams to find them.

#34: Bringing AI to the Whiteboard

Posted on July 5, 2024 (Updated July 4, 2024) by ewand

One of the joys of in-person group meetings is when someone grabs a whiteboard marker and starts laying out their still-forming thoughts to the enthralled audience, almost as popular as the person who always asks a question 2 minutes before the meeting is due to end. Thankfully, there is a digital whiteboard for use in virtual and hybrid Teams meetings, too. And like seemingly everything else, it’s getting a sprinkle of Copilot-y Goodness.

The Whiteboard app has appeared in previous ToW’s (before the Great Reset) – here. As a quick summary: if you’re a Microsoft 365 subscriber, you’ll find the Whiteboard tucked under More apps in the grid on the top left on numerous sites…

… or available directly on https://www.microsoft365.com/apps/ or just launch it directly from https://whiteboard.office.com/. A Windows app is available in the Store, though it’s really just a wrapper for the web experience.

Whiteboard is intended as a multi-user collaboration tool, available in the browser as above, or in Teams, by using the Share button (NB: if you look under the Apps button to the left of Share, you won’t easily find this Whiteboard, but there are other “Whiteboard…” 3^rd party apps which will show up: YMMV).

One very cool new feature is the ubiquitous Copilot option; it can help get you started on a brainstorming exercise, for example. Start by giving it an idea of what you’re trying to work on

… and it will come back with headings which can be quickly added as Post-it style notes

Selecting one of them and choosing Categoris|ze …

… will arrange them into subject blocks.

And selecting any one and selecting Suggest will go a level deeper and bring up some additional points.

As a discussion starter, it’s brilliant. Give it a try and see what kind of inspiration you might find.

The main Whiteboard info page is here. There are some cool templates available for getting started with some pretty detailed layouts for workshops, Kanban boards etc; more info here.

RIght, now there’s only 5 mins to go, the meeting is starting to wrap up – for goodness’ sake, keep your hands down.

Category: AI

85: Transcribing Online Videos

Take One – the live video

Take Two – the replay of video

Take Three – they published the transcript!

Feeding the Copilot

#79: Do you bother taking notes?

Digital Note Takers

Un-Fathomable

The media

#78: We don’t need no AI writin’

Generation and Summary

Em and En in the spotlight

The ChatGPT Hyphen

Spotting AI content

#69: Thinking Deeply

Copilot’s Getting Deeper

Wannabe Record Breakers

#68: It’s all about the prompt

Prompting Today

Further reading

#61: Adios, Office!

M365 Personal / Family subscriptions

Welcome Copilot Users!

#57: Excel-lent Conditional Formatting

Conditional Formatting made easy

#47: Using Copilot for (consistent) meeting notes

#45: Copilot updates flying in

#34: Bringing AI to the Whiteboard