this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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293
After Copilot Trial, Government Staff Rated Microsoft's AI Less Useful Than Expected (it.slashdot.org)
submitted 3 weeks ago by cyberpunk007 to c/[email protected]
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[–] 7rokhym 24 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

I'd be more forgiving, but what MS Copilot sucks at the worst is working with Office files: PowerPoint: completely useless

Excel: useful for some tasks if I reformat all my sheets into tables, so mostly useless

Word: can't even answer why the formatting of the file from my coworker is a mess (which is every coworker), let alone try to fix it. But it will gladly take a succinct piece of information and make it into an insufferable 50 pages of fluff. It summarizes documents well and helps with reviews.

OneNote: creating content it's ok, but useless at retrieving info.

Outlook: It tries to help, mostly confirms that my language is may be perceived as cold and offensive. Which is good, because that was my intention.

It is surprisingly helpful with PDFs and extracting data and cleaning up formatting.

Unsurprising, it does great with CSV and other open data formats. Maybe there is a lesson here?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

~~I think the lesson here is that proprietary binary formats are way more difficult for a LLM to parse.~~

~~If only we could use plaintext for everything...~~

I was wrong, see comment from @[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

They've been using OOXML for their file formats since 2007.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

Oh, it looks like you're right! TIL

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