You don’t need to pay for Microsoft’s AI service, Copilot, to get some of its benefits in Microsoft Office, especially Word, Outlook and Excel. Try converting text to a table or vice versa. The trick to grabbing text from an image. Along the way you’ll also discover some of the limits and problems with the current Copilot, like trying to make a decent chart.
We’ll use the https://copilot.microsoft.com web site because it’s the easiest to work with but you can also use the Copilot pane in the Edge browser or the more recent Windows releases. All these examples use only the free version of Copilot (not Copilot Pro or Copilot for Microsoft 365).
No special skills required beyond simply copy and paste between Copilot and the Office apps.
Convert text to table
One of paid Copilot’s tricks in Word is “Visualize as a Table” in other words convert a paragraph of text into a table. The same is possible in free Copilot.
Prompt: Convert this to a table “<text>”
Any table of results in Copilot can be copied to a document. Select the text then copy, it will paste into Word etc as a table. Or click the Excel icon at top-right to open the table in a new workbook via Excel in a browser.
Convert table into text
You can also try converting a table of data into a paragraph of text:
Prompt: Convert this table into a paragraph “<table>”
Image to text
Images can be uploaded or pasted into Copilot but officially Copilot can’t get text from an image but there are workarounds.
But if you ask Copilot to explain an image of a table, the AI will oblige.
Prompt: “Explain this table”
Tip: Excel has a ‘Get Data from Picture’ option which Copilot can also do if you ask for a table. The most recent versions of Snipping Tool in Windows 11 has a ‘Text Actions’ tool to get text from an image.
We tried a slightly harder example using a non-standard font and Copilot worked nicely.
Prompt: Convert this image into a table.
For other images, the conversion might not be as good but using Copilot can save some retyping.
Make a chart, maybe
Any table in Copilot can be converted into a chart and Copilot might offer to make a chart if there’s a table response. But the results aren’t very good.
The charts are made using Designer’s Image Creator so they are often too creative and inaccurate. Here’s what happened when we chose the offered “Make a pie chart from this table” prompt for our simple ‘three colors’ example table above.
Like any other image creator you get better, though not necessarily useful results. We tried this prompt:
Make a 3D pie chart with solid colors and no labels from this text “41% chose the Red option, 22% wanted Blue and 37% Green”
And still got images with text labels … grrrr.
Mind you, that result from Copilot is better than ChatGPT (which made something that looked nothing like a pie chart) or Google Gemini or Meta AI that could not handle the prompt at all!
Moving to and from Copilot
Text and images can be pasted into the ‘Ask me anything’ box.
Or upload an image from the bottom-right icon. There’s also the choice of speaking your prompt, click the microphone icon.
Results can be downloaded to Word, PDF or text file, as well as tables to Excel (look for the Excel icon). Often the fastest choice is simply click the ‘Copy’ button and paste to whatever place you like.
Place not thy trust in Copilot…
Copilot, like any other AI system, isn’t perfect. ALWAYS check the results to make sure they are both accurate and appropriate. See Why AI is not as great as the hype
Copilot can also include details beyond what’s provided which can be a good or bad thing, see What is ‘grounding’ in Copilot?
Write Excel formulas fast with free Copilot
Use Free Copilot to summarize Word documents
