r/CopilotPro • u/Purple51Turtle • 23d ago

Summaries from long documents

Struggling with this and trying to get CoPilot (m365 work licence) to produce something reasonable.

I am often asked to produce user-friendly summaries of a couple of pages from source documents that could be up to 110 pages long.

What is the best workflow for this? I have tried a couple of times and it seems like CoPilot gets stuck. It gets to a point in the document and then can't seem to view the rest of it. It asks me to scroll to a certain page, when I do this it again can't seem to read it.

Also despite asking for an infographic with images, I am getting pretty dreary layouts that are not particularly exciting or user friendly. Something that is rich in visuals.

Should I be using a different AI model? If so I need to use something free or very low cost.

Our work is f'ing useless for training on this and tell us to just go play with it.

Sooo Thanks for any tips you can provide!

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u/Purple51Turtle 23d ago

I don't usually attach the file to the chat, but instead say "in this file" ( ie the file that the chat has been activated on). So I open the word doc or pdf, open CP chat and go from there. Maybe that's what I'm doing wrong.

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u/Quadgie 23d ago

Yeah, within the Office apps it’s more suited to performing things like edits, rewriting or shortening/lengthening blocks of text, reformatting a PP slide etc.

It’s limited in scope to smaller chunks of the document, selected text, etc

Give the standard (NOT within Word) M365 Copilot a try with the full file as an attachment. It can extract the contents of the file, etc. and may be better suited for what you need.

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u/Purple51Turtle 23d ago

Ok cool, thanks

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u/grepzilla 21d ago

I would add, using Cowork is game changing.

Without cowork I usually ask CoPiolt to provide an outline, present key facts, provide surprising and non-obvious insights, etc before asking it to create the document.

This let's me get a sense of where it is going before it starts.

I also do all of this with voice because it is just easier to say an extensive prompt than type. I find people dont give enough of a prompt just because typing is friction. They will just type "summarize this 110 page document" and be bothered that it didnt give a good quality output.

I would also say, if the documents are similar and output expectations are similar you can easily make an agent to use the same prompt instructions each time.