AI Inside Microsoft Office

The same kind of AI covered in the last lesson is now built directly into the office applications most people already use every day — no separate website or account needed for the basics.

• Drafting from a prompt — describe the document you need (a letter, a report outline, a policy draft) and get a starting version instead of a blank page.
• Rewriting tone — turn a casual draft formal, or a long paragraph concise, without retyping it from scratch.
• Summarising — get a quick summary of a long document already open, useful before a meeting where you need the gist fast.

• Explaining data in plain language — ask what a trend in a column means, or which row is the outlier, instead of building a chart just to look.
• Suggesting formulas — describe what you want to calculate and get a working formula, useful when you know the goal but not the exact Excel function.
• Cleaning and organising — ask AI to spot inconsistent formatting or duplicate entries across a large sheet faster than scanning by eye.

• Generating a first draft deck — describe the topic and audience, and get a starting set of slides with a sensible structure to edit from.
• Design suggestions — get layout and visual design options for existing text-heavy slides, without needing design skills yourself.
• Condensing long content — turn a long document or report into a shorter slide-format summary automatically.

Google Workspace (Docs, Sheets, Slides) has equivalent AI features built in the same way, and dedicated note-taking apps offer similar drafting and summarising help focused specifically on notes and meetings. The pattern is the same everywhere: AI drafts a starting point, you review and finish it.

You've now covered using AI where it's already built in. The next two lessons go into the skill that makes every one of these tools work better: prompt engineering — how to actually ask for what you want.