#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.

#39: OneNote Shortcuts, Favourites and Pins

Posted on August 9, 2024 by ewand

Regular ToW readers may share in a collective for OneNote – and there have been plenty Tips over the years to celebrate. There are other note-taking apps out there, of course, but if you have invested time and years of notes in one, it’s hard to shift.

OneNote comes in a variety of versions spanning web, mobile, Mac & PC, and you have the ability to organise pages of notes in sections, groups and whole separate Notebooks, should you wish. Notebooks can be shared with other people and could be used to contain stuff that’s specifically for one particular project or role.

Personal vs Work

If using OneNote on the web (which needs you to be online to access it), you could have different browser profiles for work and home, and therefore all your work notebooks would be in one and your home-related ones in another. The PC version of OneNote lets you mix notebooks from different accounts, so you could have them all open in one app – handy for some, though it can lead to lots of notebooks being open and searching right across them can be bothersome (see Classic ToW #646 for help with that).

If you keep going back to a few pages for shopping lists or the likes, it’s quite easy to grab a link directly so you can find it again quickly. Go to a section or page in the web version and you can right-click to copy a link to it, forming a simple https:// URL to wherever the source is stored (on OneDrive if you’re using a personal Microsoft Account or in SharePoint if using a M365 login).

Save that URL to wherever makes sense for you and it will launch directly to that page in a new browser upon activation.

Desktop vs Web

If you’re using the PC OneNote app, however, you’d want to have the page open in that app rather than in the browser. In the old days, you could drag a OneNote page to your desktop or some other Explorer folder, and it would create a shortcut to it – but not any more.

If you repeat the above process of right clicking / copying a link when in the app, then paste the resulting link into Notepad or similar, you’ll see there are actually two links – firstly, a https:// formatted URL and a second beginning onenote:https:// and finishing &end.

Select and copy the line(s) beginning onenote: to the end, then you can create a shortcut elsewhere – it’s a bit of a palaver, but…

· right-click on desktop or in your chosen folder,

· choose New > Shortcut and paste the onenote: link in there… hit Next,

· give it a meaningful name and save it

· now you could launch OneNote directly to your chosen page, with a simple tap or double click on that icon.

OneTastic to the rescue

A simpler way is to use the Pin to Favorites (sic) feature in the most excellent addon, OneTastic; this lets you create and pin links to a variety of locations, perhaps most usefully within the “Favorites” section of that menu itself – and to recall a Fav in future, just go to that menu to quickly navigate to several pinned OneNote pages and sections.

The “Favorites” location can be accessed in the file system if you like, too – just press WindowsKey+R to get the Run command up, then enter %appdata%\OneTastic and you’ll find the folder in there.

Pin it on the move

Mobile users have a simpler way, at least Android users do. Within OneNote, select the 3-dot menu on the top right of a page, and you can Add to Home screen; this will try to pin a shortcut to whatever kind of homescreen / launcher you have.

iOS users might need to rely on a Widgety solution instead.

#38: Get ahead: get a proper monitor

Posted on August 2, 2024 (Updated August 2, 2024) by ewand

As WFH became normalised during the pandemic, a lot of people went from having access to a reasonable working environment in an office, to sitting on the sofa or camping on a kitchen table. A trend of working from a laptop in coffee shops had already been underway and got additional legitimacy when things opened up again.

For the lucky ones with space at home, the increasing trend for WF there sometimes means they have a better environment than in the office – no desk sharing, putting up with co-workers’ smelly/noisy/annoying habits, perhaps even a faster internet connection. This doubtless contributes to the reported reluctance to return to the rat-race in the office.

Make the most of your screen

One huge downside of working off a laptop is that the screen – even for the biggest ones – is small.

There’s little doubt that productivity gains can be had by having larger monitors or more of them. Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch from gave a seminal talk on time management in 2007 – prescient, since he was dying of pancreatic cancer at the time and had only months left to live (his Last Lecture is also worth watching). In that session, he advised that maximizing screen real estate is one of the best things you can do.

The simplest way to improve screen area for a home office desk is to buy a decent monitor. Find one with adjustable height (so you can be looking straight at it, not down at a laptop screen) and position the laptop in front of you, below the monitor.

Extend the desktop to the big screen and make that your main display (so new windows, the task bar, Start menu etc will appear there rather than on your laptop).

Side-to-side

It’d be even better if you can use a proper keyboard and mouse, maybe with a suitable docking station, then park the laptop to the side. Ideally you should prop it up so that its display and your monitor are similar in height – there are plenty laptops stands available, or you could even just put it on a pile of books…

Big screen x little screens

If you’ve had a home office setup for a while, it’s possible you’ll have one or two old monitors that won’t be worth much at resale so you could always bring them into action in a true “multi-monitor” setup (without delving into additional hardware to allow more, Windows 11 supports up to 6 displays).

Then again, a single large monitor might be a bit more feng shui, and there are plenty of good displays out there. A single, widescreen, curved monitor could give you the same kind of functionality as having two side-by regular widescreen ones, with less cabling and fuss.

Modern displays often have USB hubs and lots of other features such as display modes where two inputs are shown side-by-side (so you have two different PCs on display, or a PC on one side and an Xbox on the other half, or take two inputs from one PC into one physical screen – the computer would see it as two side-by-side monitors, which might have benefits when it comes to app layouts).

Managing the placement of windows is a lot easier with the groovy window snapping stuff introduced in Windows 11 (hover over the maximize icon on the top right of your window, and you’ll see options for where to snap it onto the screen… it’s more than just left/right since if you have a mahoosive screen, you’ll likely have several windows side-by-side). If you need more control, or you’re running Windows 10, try the Fancy Zones utility as part of PowerToys.

Dell Ultrasharp and Display Manager

Dell have long made some of the best PC monitors; particularly their more expensive Ultrasharp range. If you’re shopping for a new screen, there are various ways to save money too – they have a Dell Advantage program where you can get specific vouchers (eg Microsoft employees can get theirs by entering their work email here), and they have an Outlet store for refurbished goods.

If you have a Dell monitor already, there’s an app for Windows and Mac which could make your life a little better, especially if you routinely switch between inputs / PiP modes etc – the Dell Display Manager. Connect your PC and the monitor with a USB cable, and you can use the software on the PC to control how the monitor works, rather than monkeying around trying to press tiny buttons to drive the On-Screen Display menu. You can even set up shortcut keys to make it easier to dive in.

Tidy.

#37: What’s your LinkedIn SSI score?

Posted on July 29, 2024 by ewand

Are you the kind of vainglorious blowhard who likes to tell everyone about all your latest achievements or humblebrag your gratitude for some amazing success / that latest certification? Some people think that’s what LinkedIn is for. With over one billion users, there are certainly opportunities for networking and sharing interesting content too, and not all of it leaves its reader feeling queasy.

There’s a scoring facility on LinkedIn, hitherto visible only to subscribers of the $100-1600 per month (yes) “Sales Navigator” product: SSI. Nothing to do with nature sites or social security, Social Selling Index is a score to tell you how well you stack up against your peers when it comes to four pillars of social selling.

It’s available to regular cheapskate LinkedIn free users too – check your score out on https://www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi

When Microsoft bought LinkedIn in 2016, the $26B price paid seemed like quite a lot, even if competitors openly moaned about it. In the last fiscal year alone, LinkedIn brought in $15B of revenue so it seems like a pretty good investment all-in. The Microsoft FY24 results are due next week so we’ll see if its inexorable growth continues (hint: it’s been adding 8-9% compared to the previous year over the last 3 quarters, so it’s seems a fair bet).

What is “Social Selling” anyway?

In short, it’s a way of identifying sales prospects and using social media to connect and interact with them. Clearly, LinkedIn thinks it’s the most likely place for this to happen, though some industries and/or demographics might find Instagram or Tik Tok to be their platform of choice.

LinkedIn claims that people who are good at social selling create more opportunities, are more likely to reach their quota, and that 78% of them will outsell their peers who don’t use social media (bad luck if you’re one of the 22% that get outperformed by old style relationship sellers). You could use the Social Selling Index to see how you stack up against those who don’t use social selling skills.

The freebie view of your SSI score doesn’t really give you any explanation as to why it is what it is, nor particularly practical tips for how to get it higher… There are plenty of articles online offering tips on how to make your SSI go up, and the somewhat dry help page for Sales Nav does give a little more info.

It’s a calculation based on 4 pillars:

Establish your brand – basically, how complete is your LinkedIn profile and how much stuff you post/share. Pepper your profile with the right buzzwords and your score might go up. Treat your LinkedIn profile like it’s your CV/resumé with at least a bit of detail of your experience, add a profile photo etc, and you should do OK.

Find the right people – how well are you growing your network with new connections? Finding new prospects and connections might be easier if you’re a Sales Navigator subscriber as the searching tools are more granular, but you can still get a long way with the built-in search and filtering tools. If you don’t want to pay for Sales Navigator, you might still find value in the less spendy LinkedIn Premium.

Engage with insights – a rating where LinkedIn looks at how you engage with other people’s content (liking, commenting) and how much you share yourself (whether it’s reposting or creating something new). Being active in LinkedIn Groups also helps.

Build relationships – supposedly “connecting and establishing trust” – though likely measured by how many interactions you have with people, like commenting on their posts or sending them messages, maybe even commenting or liking back on other people’s comments on your posts.

Normally, you’re the only one who can see your SSI, but if you get an Enterprise license for Sales Navigator, then your admin can see everything and you might be able to see how the other members of your team are doing:

If your company is paying for a Sales Navigator license for you, then it’s always possible you could find that maintaining a certain level of SSI as one of your compensable OKRs.

So, being consistently busy on LinkedIn is likely to make your social selling index go up, even if the things you do are not necessarily examples of good social selling… the maxim of “Empty vessels make most noise” may still apply to LinkedIners who spend all their time doing stuff of low value.

You’ll find lots of online resources explaining why Social Selling is A Good Thing, and how to do it better. There’s even a book about Social Selling on LinkedIn should you feel like some summer holiday reading by the pool.

#36: Navigating Windows by keyboard

Posted on July 19, 2024 by ewand

Now and again, it’s useful to be able to use Windows without mouse or touch, especially should the unexpected happen. Accessibility needs aside, it’s been possible to move around and control Windows since the very early days, just by using combinations of keystrokes.

ALT+F4 is maybe the most memorable (for closing a window), apart from CTRL+ALT+DEL.

A few other window management keystrokes worthy of mention:

WindowsKey+up/down/right/left arrows – maximize the current window to fullscreen (up), back from fullscreen to previous size or minimizes it (down), and snaps the window to one side of the screen or back (left/right).

ALT+TAB / SHIFT+ALT+TAB – cycles through the current open windows (and add SHIFT to go backwards). Releasing the ALT+TAB combo then jumps to whichever window is highlighted; press CTRL+ALT+TAB to just display the open windows, let you move between them and jump to one by clicking on it or pressing ENTER.

ALT+left/right arrow – moves back and forward, as in clicking the back/forward arrow icons in a browser

WindowsKey + number – jumps to the nth application on your taskbar; if you pin an app/window to the taskbar and it stays in the same place so you could use WindowsKey+1 to jump to Explorer, Win+2 to go to the browser etc.

See more here. Many more.

Powered Up

As previous ToWs have mentioned (here, here, here etc), the collection of utilities called PowerToys is well worth installing; one of its default apps is a shortcut guide showing some key WindowsKey + nnn options. (Press WindowsKey+SHIFT+/ to display temporarily).

On the topic of PowerToys, one of the utilities is a special “Run” app which does a good bit more than the standard WindowsKey+R command which displays the old fashioned Run dialog;

PowerToys Run has a load of special characters to make special searches; enter ?? something will search the web using your default, or (optionally) put o: something searches your OneNote notebooks for that term.

Somewhat controversially, the default activation keystroke for PowerToys Run is ALT+Space, which has been a Windows shortcut to display the context menu of the current window. Pressing that combo followed by M or R would be used to move / resize (using the arrow keys) or N and X would minimize / maximize that window.

In a curmudgeonly article, El Reg complained that old school keyboard warriors would be most upset. The also suggest that the pre-Win95 icon for that corner of the window was a Spacebar, supposedly to illustrate that you press ALT+SPACE to open it.

Never fear, keyboard fans – you can simply remap the activation key to something else (like WindowsKey+Space) and the ALT+SPACE combo will continue to work like it’s 1987.

#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.

#32: Microsoft Designer gets everywhere

Posted on June 21, 2024 by ewand

Assuming you haven’t woken from cryonic stasis (leaving aside all the practical difficulties of doing that) then you’ll already know of the hallucinatory ChatGPT and its image-creating sidekick, DALL-E, which will spit out a computer generated image from a text-based description of what you want.

Predictably, there are many memes on whether AI is a good thing or not, along with worries that it’s coming for your jobs/freedom/happiness etc. In many ways, it’s just another wave of technology which is certainly impactful, but its benefit will be seen by how we creatively embrace it.

Also doing the rounds is the trope of “I want AI to do my laundry” which is poignant if not really a new thing (see Keynes c1930, or Bertrand Russell’s “In praise of Idleness”, c1932). Technology is invented to supposedly give us more time but often displaces one form of work for another. Now, AI prompt engineering will be a creative skill, to a degree replacing the need for designing, drawing or painting skills.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has been busy embedding DALL-E technology into other apps and services, broadly packaged under its “Designer” branding. You can generate images for embedding into LinkedIn articles, for example …

… though with some mixed level of success, depending on what you want…

Alternatively, just go straight to the Copilot prompt…

Even the venerable Paint has gotten a new Image Creator function which does much the same thing, though annoyingly defaults to a 1:1 aspect ratio, regardless of the orientation of the canvas. In the main Copilot/Designer UI there is a little icon to change the ratio of your image from square to landscape, however it ends up generating a new image entirely.

Restyle it out

Remember all those early 2000s makeover TV shows which gave frumpy looking people another view on what to wear? Well, there’s a Restyle capability in Designer that’s so much fun to play with, you could easily spend the rest of the day mucking about with pictures to see what selfies look like in art style, how the dog would be if made of Plasticine, and so on…

Take your source image…

…then choose one of a variety of styles, and be prepared for outright weirdness or outright flattery…

Right, that’s enough of the day wasted. Get on with your work!

#31: Easy and Excel-lent Data sources

Posted on June 14, 2024 (Updated June 12, 2024) by ewand

Most people who have spent time using Microsoft Excel will realize that it probably has more capabilities than they’ll ever understand, much less use. There are so many functions used to collate, display and interpret data that it’s no wonder people turn to using it for all sorts of things.

There have been numerous attempts to make user-friendly data tools for Excel, from web-scraping 3^rd party sites to the short-lived Money in Excel for American users which bit the dust before it was barely out of diapers.

More recent releases of Excel include several Linked Data Types which can retrieve and manipulate data from “reputable sources of data, such as Bing”… (which, incidentally, had its 15^th birthday recently). Companies with suitable data governance can expose internal info for analysis, or regular end users can get started with share prices, currency conversions and geographical data.

In the Data tab in the current versions of Excel on multiple platforms, you’ll see 3 or 4 types of data that can quickly be inserted – they will perform a lookup on external information and return a data set in the background which can be displayed and otherwise interacted with using formulae, lookups and other standard data tools in Excel.

Getting real-time data is pretty straightforward – create a blank table with a single column in which you’ll enter your key data items that you want to expand on – for currency conversions, it would be a pair of currency symbols (USD:EUR or GBP/USD etc) that you then select and mark as Currency from the data tab. That then lets you easily add other columns for specific lookup data, and that can be referenced itself through other formulae too.

Stock lookups work similarly, by entering the ticker symbol in one column and potentially going through a matching exercise to find the right one. Handy, if you have a workbook for calculating when you can stick it to the man and retire to a patch in the Tuscany hills: you can automatically look up the stock values and convert their currencies too, if required.

There’s some location stuff as well, invoked by entering city or area names; it’s more text-based reference info which is returned, though it might be possible to feed some of the data into a Map Chart for further visualization.

#30: Snipping Smarter

Posted on June 7, 2024 (Updated June 7, 2024) by ewand

Windows’ Snipping Tool, used to capture an area of the screen, has been around for a long time in various guises, even threatened with cancellation at least once. Invoking the tool by pressing SHIFT+WindowsKey+S or just hitting the PrtScn button (if you have one) now displays a small dialog at the top of a dimmed screen.

You can choose to capture a static image (of a part of the screen, or the whole thing) or a record a video of a marked section of the screen, optionally with your own commentary – useful for sharing a quick “how to” video.

Another way of capturing the entire screen is to press WindowsKey+PrtScn, which can be useful when trying to grab menus and things that might disappear if you tried to interact with them – like the first image above, since the screen grab menu itself will disappear as soon as you click the mouse button.

As well as copying the snipped area to the clipboard, an updated Snipping Tool from about 18 months ago also saved them to a Screenshots folder, so it’s easy to go back and fish them out later. See 665 – Mind your screenshots for more details; it’s worth keeping an eye on that Screenshots folder so it doesn’t get overly large and/or contain stuff that you might not want to keep.

REDACT THE gggg TEXT

Some further updates to Snipping Tool have been happening of late; there’s some nice functionality which lets you extract text from the grabbed area to the clipboard (as paste-able text rather than an image), or to redact certain bits of the screen so as to preserve potentially confidential info.

The Quick redact feature tries to identify some data types, but to manually scratch it out, just select the text you want to hide, right-click and choose Redact.

When you’re happy, click the Copy button on the top right

And that will put the fully redacted version into the clipboard, either replacing what was there before or adding it to the list if you have Clipboard History turned on.

Another newish addition is the quick ability to feed your screen grabbed image to the Visual Search in Bing, effectively doing a reverse image lookup – just look in the … menu on the top right.

#29: The power of CTRL

Posted on June 3, 2024 by ewand

The familiar computer keyboard has evolved over decades, even though some languages have obstinately different layouts; Germans have QWERTZ and French users have AZERTY, while Brits used to their usual keyboard might struggle to find the backslash on an American machine, and accidentally hit Enter when looking for the hash key.

Most keyboards feature control keys on the bottom corners; designed as a “modifier” to be used in conjunction with other keys to activate certain commands, there are some well-known combos like CTRL+C and CTRL+V for copy and paste. There are outliers – German keyboards have Strg instead of Ctrl, and even an obsolete ISO standard says the key could be marked “⎈”.

There are some occasions when the Control key is not just a straightforward modifier; aside from using Sticky Keys to keep it pressed, one somewhat hidden feature in the Edge browser turns Ctrl to good effect, for opening an image in a zoomable overlay window.

Many images embedded in web pages are much bigger than you might think; the source picture could be something like 2000×1500 pixels in size, but when displayed on the site, it’s reduced to 640×480. In such cases, you can use the CTRL key to magnify the original image without having to navigate away from the current page.

If the Edge window is in focus, move your mouse cursor over an image and try tapping CTRL twice; if the site can support it, you’ll see the image displayed in a pop-up window that lets you zoom in out (with the mouse scroll wheel or by stroking your laptop touchpad).

If you have the PowerToys addon pack installed, you may also have Find My Mouse enabled, and that too uses one of the Control keys as its activator. Happily, if a little confusingly perhaps, both can co-exist so you’ll expand the highlighted image while temporarily spotlighting where your pointer is.