Best AI Tool for the Job: Two Ways to Test Before You Commit

Somebody asks me this in almost every class now: “Tom, we have Copilot at work, I pay for ChatGPT out of my own pocket, and my nephew swears by Claude. Which one should I actually use?” It is a fair question, and nobody gives a straight answer. The honest answer is that the best AI tool depends on the job in front of you, and you can work out which one that is in about ten minutes instead of arguing about it for six months.

What I usually see instead is somebody picking a tool from a demo video, using it for easy stuff like rewriting an email, and never once pointing it at the work that actually eats their week. Then they decide AI does not really help with their job. The tool was probably fine. The test was the problem.

Here are the two tests I run with clients. Neither one needs IT, a budget, or a committee meeting.

Test One: Hand All Three the Same Ugly Job

Do not use a sample file. Pull something real off your desk from last week, ideally something messy, and give the exact same prompt to each assistant in a brand new chat. Here is the wording I use:

Below is a real export from our system. 1) List what is wrong with this data. 2) Give me the exact Excel formula to flag duplicate customer names. 3) Explain that formula in one plain sentence. Do not invent any columns that are not in the data.

Then paste your data underneath it and send. That last sentence matters more than anything else in the prompt. It is the line that separates an assistant that admits what it cannot see from one that cheerfully makes up a “Region” column you never had.

Score each answer on four things, and write the scores down:

• Did it stay honest? Any invented column, any made-up total, and it loses on the spot.
• Did the formula actually work? Paste it into Excel. Do not take anyone’s word for it, mine included.
• How much editing did the explanation need before you would send it to a colleague?
• How long did the whole thing take, including your cleanup?

The gotcha: run each one in a fresh chat. If you test inside an ongoing conversation, or inside a Project that already has your files loaded, the assistant has context the others do not, and it will look smarter than it is. And if the data has customer names, account numbers, or anything you would not email outside the building, run the test on a scrubbed copy or in your company-licensed account, not a free personal one.

Test Two: Find the Best AI Tool for Where Your Work Actually Lives

Quality is only half of it. The other half is whether the assistant can reach your material at all, and the three are not remotely equal here.

Microsoft Copilot is the one that lives inside your tenant. In Word, Excel, and Outlook you will find it on the Home tab of the ribbon. In Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, type a forward slash and start typing a filename to pull a specific document from OneDrive or SharePoint straight into the conversation. When the answer has to come out of your own files, your mail, or a Teams thread, nothing else is close. Two gotchas: it only sees what your account already has permission to see, and a file sitting on your C: drive is invisible to it. In Excel it also wants your data formatted as a real table, so select your range and press Ctrl+T first.

Claude is the one I reach for on long documents and careful writing. Create a Project, upload your files once, and every chat inside that project can see them, which beats re-uploading the same policy document eleven times. The gotcha is that it does not live inside Excel, so formulas and text move by copy and paste.

ChatGPT sits in the middle: strong on drafting, and genuinely good at analyzing a spreadsheet you upload to it. The gotcha is the same shape as Claude’s. The file is in that chat, not on your network, and nobody else on your team sees it.

So the decision rule is short. If the answer must come out of your company’s files and email, the best AI tool is the one already inside that tenant. If the work is thinking, writing, or analysis on a file you can simply upload, let Test One pick the winner on quality.

Plenty more on the calendar

I am running a live session on exactly this, ChatGPT vs Copilot vs Claude: The Best AI Tool for Your Business, on Monday, October 19. We put all three side by side on real business tasks, look at where each one earns its keep and where it wastes your time, and talk through how to choose without rolling out three subscriptions. Come to that one, or browse whatever else fits your week. The full current schedule is on the front page of PCWebinars.com, and new dates go up as they are confirmed.

About your trainer

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

If any of this sounds like your week, come see what is scheduled at PCWebinars.com.