Why you will never experience blank page syndrome again with Copilot

Never draw a blank again

Acclaimed author Irvine Welsh once said: “I enjoy the freedom of the blank page.” Lucky for him.

But for many, the whole concept of a blank page is terrifying. While you may know what you want to write, actually putting your initial thoughts down on paper for a blog, presentation, proposal, speech, email to the boss, job application, etc, can be daunting – even paralysing. You may end up so stressed that you are unable to start. This is blank-page syndrome.

Whether you need inspiration, ideas to play around with, a summary based on your wealth of existing content, or a first draft to motivate you, Copilot breaks the ice. And if you want it to, it does a lot of the heavy lifting, too – sifting through your content library to find and intelligently collate on-point and relevant content so you don’t need to recreate the wheel; just tweak it.

In a meeting using Microsoft Whiteboard and starting with a blank whiteboard or a few ideas, but the team isn’t offering any further discussion points? Ask Copilot to your meeting, and it will start brainstorming right alongside.

Imagine you’ve written the perfect PowerPoint. It’s beautifully composed, compelling, and almost ready to share. But first, it needs some stunning images to support your content. However, as your graphic designer is constantly busy and booked out, your options are to trawl through (and pay for) stock images, choose from Microsoft’s free image gallery, or risk breaching copyright by grabbing random pictures off the internet.  

So, instead, you ask Copilot to look at the content of your PowerPoint and generate some original, contextually relevant, and royalty-free images to illustrate the slides. Just for you.

Is it risky? No. Microsoft is so confident that Copilot will only generate original images and content that they will back you if anyone tries to sue you for copyright or intellectual property infringements.

Even if you try to get it to infringe copyright, it won’t. For example, ask it to draw you Pikachu (a Pokémon character) or a can of Coca-Cola, and it won’t. But if you ask it to draw you a cat in Pokémon style or a new brand of Cola, it will do so quite happily. It remains to be seen if you can copyright your Pokémon cat, though, or if Copilot will generate the same image for everyone who asks. 

So, you can use both Copilot’s content and image generation capabilities with confidence. If you ask Copilot to find reference material for you, it comes with attributions to the original source, so you can pick and choose whether it’s appropriate, credible, or relevant.

Happy days are here again

We all love apps and have great ideas for how they can make everyday office and personal life easier. From reminding teams to regularly stand up, stretch, walk, and top up on water to sending out alerts to whoever’s assigned to load the staff dishwasher on any given day or collecting catering preferences for a conference – apps are invaluable. If only creating one wasn’t outside the capabilities of most people!

And that’s where Copilot again will delight.

You can tell Copilot in Power Platform, in natural language, what you want it to do and point it at the data – like an Excel spreadsheet listing the staff kitchen roster. Within seconds, it will create a prototype you can use as is or refine. Obviously, more skills are required to pull in other data streams and generate reporting, but the capability to design and build a basic mobile-ready app in minutes is within the reach of most users.

When Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the starship Enterprise in the Star Trek series, said ‘Make it so,” he could well have been thinking of Copilot and its love of taking natural voice commands and turning them into actions.

Whether it’s productivity tools like Word, PowerPoint, Excel or OneNote or developer tools like Power Automate and Power Platform, getting creative is easier and more natural with Copilot. As there’s no requirement for anything but natural language, you can ask for multiple iterations and styles without receiving a complaint or an eye roll.

Best of all, while Microsoft 365 Copilot champions and empowers creativity, the side effect is more productivity and improved collaboration.

In our business, we call that a win-win-win.