ChatGPT and Copilot: Two Handoffs That Save an Hour

Almost every week somebody in class asks me the same question: “Should I be using ChatGPT or Copilot?” My answer is usually neither one on its own. The people getting real time back are using ChatGPT and Copilot together, and handing the work from one to the other at the right moment.

Here is why. Copilot lives inside your files, your mailbox, and your calendar. It knows what is in the spreadsheet you have open. But it is cautious, and it gets vague the moment you ask it to think hard about something. ChatGPT is the opposite — it will reason through a messy problem and write you a clean formula, but it has no idea what is in your workbook unless you tell it.

So stop picking a side. Let ChatGPT do the thinking and let Copilot do the placing. Here are two handoffs I use almost every day.

Tip 1: Use ChatGPT and Copilot Together to Turn Raw Meeting Notes Into a Sendable Email

You come out of a forty minute call with a page of half-sentences. The status email takes you twenty minutes because you are reorganizing while you write.

Do the reorganizing first, in ChatGPT. Paste your notes and type this:

Here are my raw notes from a project meeting. Turn them into a status update with three sections: Decisions Made, Open Questions with an owner for each, and Next Steps with dates. Keep it under 200 words, plain language. If an owner or a date is not in my notes, write TBD — do not guess. Notes follow:

That last sentence is the whole trick. Without it, both of these tools will happily invent a due date that nobody agreed to, and you will not notice until someone asks where it came from.

Now take that structured output into Outlook. Open a new message, click Copilot on the Message tab, choose Draft with Copilot, paste the ChatGPT text into the prompt box, and add: Rewrite this as an email to my project team. Keep every fact and date exactly as written. Brief and friendly. When the draft appears, use the Adjust control underneath it and set Length to Short and Tone to Direct.

Copilot does the part it is actually good at — matching the tone of your mailbox, pulling the right recipients off the thread, and dropping the draft straight into a message you can send.

The gotcha: Copilot’s rewrite will occasionally drop a bullet it decided was redundant. Read the two side by side before you hit Send. It takes fifteen seconds and it has saved me more than once.

Tip 2: Ask ChatGPT for the Formula, Then Let Copilot in Excel Apply It

This is the one that gets the biggest reaction in class. You have an export where somebody crammed three pieces of information into one column — something like Smith, John (Acct 4471) — and you need them split apart.

Copilot in Excel is genuinely good at adding a column across thousands of rows. It is much weaker at working out the text-parsing logic. So get the logic from ChatGPT. Paste five real sample rows and type:

These values are in column A of an Excel table named Data, header "Customer". Write one Excel formula using TEXTBEFORE, TEXTAFTER and TRIM that returns just the account number. Give me the formula only, then explain each argument in one line.

Telling it the table name and the exact header matters. Leave that out and ChatGPT will invent column names that do not exist in your file, and the formula will come back as #NAME?.

Take the formula back into Excel. Click anywhere in your data, go to the Home tab, click Copilot at the right end of the ribbon, choose Add formula columns, and paste the formula in. Copilot inserts it down the entire column and names the column for you.

Two gotchas here. First, Copilot in Excel will refuse to work on a plain range — press Ctrl+T to turn your data into a table first. Second, the file has to be saved to OneDrive or SharePoint with AutoSave on, or the Copilot button sits there greyed out. And if you are on Excel 2019 or 2021 rather than Microsoft 365, TEXTBEFORE and TEXTAFTER do not exist yet — ask ChatGPT for a LEFT/MID/FIND version instead.

Ten minutes of setup, and a cleanup job you used to do by hand every month stops being a job.

Plenty more on the calendar

If you want to see both of these handoffs done live, with real files and time for your own questions, I am running How to Use ChatGPT & Copilot Together to Automate Daily Office Tasks on Wednesday, October 14. We go through the meeting-notes handoff, the Excel cleanup, and a few more places where passing work between the two tools beats using either one alone.

The full current schedule is on the front page of PCWebinars.com, and new dates go up as they are confirmed. Register for this one, or have a look through the others and find the session that fits what you are stuck on this month.

About your trainer

I’m Tom Fragale. I have been a computer trainer and consultant for more than 30 years, and I have taught well over 30,000 people how to get more out of the software they already own — Excel, Access, Power BI, Word, Outlook, and now the AI tools that sit on top of all of it: Claude, ChatGPT, and Microsoft Copilot.

My background is applied, not theoretical. Alongside teaching, I build real databases and reporting systems for clients in Excel, Access, and Power BI, so the examples I use in class are the problems I ran into last week, not textbook exercises. I also publish free tutorials on YouTube and longer courses online.

Come see what is coming up at PCWebinars.com.