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About this lesson

Use Copilot to take the hard work out of reading long documents by creating a summary and interrogate the text by asking questions. 

Quick reference

Summarize and Ask Questions

Save time and ask Copilot to summarize long documents and answer questions. 

When to use

We use Copilot to summarize long documents whenever we want to extract just the key points and focus on what matters. 

Instructions

Summarize Documents

  • Open the document 'Education Legislation.docx' from the course files folder. 
  • From the Home tab, click the Copilot button. 
  • Type the prompt: 'Summarize this doc'. 
  • Press Enter. 

Copilot will return a list of the main points from the document. We can choose to expand on any of these points. 

  • Type the prompt: 'Expand on the main point in the summary'. 
  • Press Enter. 

Ask Questions

We can use Copilot to ask questions about our document. The answer must exist in the document for Copilot to be able to return an accurate result. 

  • Type the prompt: 'Who has conducted this report?'. 
  • Press Enter. 

Copilot will return the answer. 

  • Type the prompt: 'How much has the government invested to improve the recruitment and retention of teachers in key STEM and technical shortage subjects'. 
  • Press Enter. 

Copilot will return the answer. 

  • Type the prompt: 'What is the Advanced British Standard?'. 
  • Press Enter. 

Copilot will return the answer. 

Hints & tips

  • We can see where in the document the answers to questions came from by expanding the references area. 
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  • 00:04 In a previous lesson, I mentioned that Copilot is amazing for
  • 00:08 summarizing long documents.
  • 00:10 And we can even ask questions of our documents using Copilot, so
  • 00:14 let's take a look at an example of that.
  • 00:16 Now, here I have a document that I downloaded off the government website.
  • 00:20 And it is a pretty long document with a lot of information in it.
  • 00:25 Now I could either spend my time reading through this long document or
  • 00:29 I could get Copilot to just summarize the main points.
  • 00:32 So this is going to save me a lot of time.
  • 00:35 So when we open up Copilot,
  • 00:37 we're simply going to click on the suggested prompt Summarize this doc.
  • 00:41 It's going to go away, it's going to read through all of that information, and
  • 00:45 it's going to produce a concise list of the key takeaways in that document.
  • 00:49 And this is one of those features that I absolutely love because it is such
  • 00:53 a time saver.
  • 00:54 And there we go, you can see that it's produced a bullet pointed list of the main
  • 00:59 ideas contained within this document.
  • 01:01 That's a lot shorter for me to read than going through all of the pages.
  • 01:05 Also notice that you can see exactly which part of the document the point has been
  • 01:09 taken from simply by expanding the references section.
  • 01:12 So you can quickly jump to the relevant part of your document, if you need to.
  • 01:16 Now I've clicked another suggested prompt, Expand on the main point in this summary.
  • 01:21 So it's going to take the main point at the top there, and
  • 01:24 it's going to give me a little bit more information surrounding it.
  • 01:28 So if we find that one of these summarized points is not quite full enough for
  • 01:32 our needs, we can just expand on that a little bit more.
  • 01:35 And there we go, I can now see a little bit more information about that key point.
  • 01:39 Now what about if I want to ask questions about this document?
  • 01:43 For example, who has conducted this report?
  • 01:46 Well, Copilot can answer questions that you ask, but obviously,
  • 01:50 the answer needs to be somewhere in the document.
  • 01:53 So I'm hoping that somewhere in here,
  • 01:55 we have reference to who has actually put this report together.
  • 01:59 And I can see here that, yes, this was conducted by the House of Lords Committee.
  • 02:04 Let's ask our document another question.
  • 02:06 This time, how much has the government invested to improve the recruitment and
  • 02:10 retention of teachers in key STEM and technical shortage subjects?
  • 02:15 Copilot is taking a scan of the document, and
  • 02:18 you can see there is the answer, 600 million.
  • 02:22 Notice underneath we again have some contextual suggested prompts.
  • 02:26 So I'm going to select this one, What is the Advanced British Standard?
  • 02:30 And there we have our answer.
  • 02:32 So Copilot is an amazing way of summarizing key points in a document, and
  • 02:37 also asking questions about information and getting fast answers.

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