alt Hacker NewsYeah, working in an MS shop in the past couple years, that's what I've been saying ever since first iteration Copilot for MS Office came out, and it's true to this very day: you want AI to help you with your MS Office files? Ask ChatGPT. Or get API keys and use some frontend with a half-assed third party plugin that knows how to convert Markdown into .docx or such. Results are still an order of magnitude better than the Copilot in MS Office.
I blame it on corporate reluctance to take risks that could result in bad press. They put a lot of work into screwing Copilot up. I mean, they had it running GPT-4 back when GPT-4 was the new hot thing. The way it was comically useless is not something that "just happens" - as evidenced by the fact, that just running GPT-4 via API yourself produced good results by default.
Thats a good note. I have all of my documentation in markdown (which Microsoft parades on with Github, VSCode, docs.microsoft.com etc) but Copilot cant or wont read these files. I had to pandoc everything over to docx files before it even saw them. Pretty wild.
Also in line with this, Copilot 365 seems to not get how charts work. I asked it with multiple different massaged data sets and it kept giving worse and worse answers even after resetting the chat and data to as simple as possible (think 10 dates, 2 colums of integers) until it ultimately gave me a blank chart. I gave up and asked GPT.