AI in Your Microsoft World: Copilot, ChatGPT and Claude Inside Office

How many times did you open Word, Excel or PowerPoint this week?

For many of us, these apps are part of everyday work. They feel familiar, reliable and almost invisible. But now, AI is starting to live inside those same tools.

In this episode, Maxine looks at three AI tools you can use within the Microsoft Office space:

Copilot for creating and improving PowerPoint presentations
ChatGPT for working with Excel formulas, reports and data
Claude for writing, rewriting and improving Word documents

The big idea is simple: when AI works inside the app, it can see more context. That means less switching between tabs, less copying and pasting, and more useful support while you are already working.

This episode is especially useful for South African small business owners, managers, freelancers, teams and everyday workers who want to start using AI in practical ways without learning a completely new system.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

Why using AI inside your documents is different from using it in a browser
How Copilot can help you turn documents into presentations
How ChatGPT can support Excel formulas, data checks and reports
How Claude can help with proposals, business writing and tone
Why context matters when asking AI for help
A simple challenge you can try this week inside your own Microsoft tools

Try this after listening:
Pick one tool — Copilot, ChatGPT or Claude — and try it inside one Microsoft app you already use. Start with one real task, not a perfect experiment.

Transcript

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Let's go.

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Hello, hello, and welcome to AI for South Africa. This is Maxine and welcome to the show. Today I want to ask you something. How many times did you open Word or Excel or PowerPoint? For most of us, it's almost every day. Sometimes it's multiple times a day. Maybe for some of you it's only once a week. But these are the apps that we've been using for years. These are the apps that feel like furniture in the office. Familiar, reliable. Always there. Here's the thing though. Did you know that AI is sitting right in there? It's not something that you have to go and find. It's not a separate tab that you have to open or go to the internet. It's not another tool you need to download or learn. AI is right there inside of these apps, and we're not using it. Most people I speak to have no idea. Like they're saying ChatGPT in a browser. They go into the browser, they copy the text, they paste the text. Again, that human copy-paste function. And it works, but it's like having a microwave in your kitchen and then still cooking everything with a bra inside. You're still cooking stuff, but it's a little bit easier with a microwave, it's faster with a microwave. So today we're gonna fix that. I'm gonna take you through all three AI tools that are available within the Microsoft Office space, like inside. Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude. What it does in there, how you can get it, and then some real examples of how people are using it. And then a takeaway, of course. Let's get into it. So before we go into each tool, I want to answer the question I get most often, and it's a fair one. Why would I use AI inside the app when I'm already using it in the browser? And the short answer is because AI can actually see your whole document while you're asking it questions. When you open Chat GTP in a browser and you paste your text in, you're doing the copy-paste job again. An AI can only see what you give it. Whereas if AI is in the document, it can actually see everything. In your sidebar, right next to your spreadsheets. It can see the data in column B, it can see what the name is, it has the full context. Remember, the more context we give AI, the better job it does. And the better it is at pleasing our ask. And really the big shift as well is you stop switching from one application to the other. You're saving those micro minutes, which in this world is everything nowadays. It's generally one of the biggest time savers in work, is from switching from one app to another app to another app, copying and pasting and coming back. So AI living inside the app, you just ask it, it responds right there in place of it. So let's look at each tool. The first one we all know is in this space, and this is Copilot. Copilot is Microsoft's own AI, and it is built directly in all of Microsoft's 365 applications. It's in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, even Outlook. And it's not an add-on from any other company. Microsoft made it, Microsoft owns it, and it lives natively inside of all the Office apps. So what do you get for it? If you already have a Microsoft subscription, there's a good chance you already have Copilot. Everybody knows I'm not a big fan of Copilot, but it is getting better as time goes by. I promise I will do a deep dive at some point and share my results with it. There are different versions of the Copilot app. Some are for deeper integration, like into OneDrive and emails within your app. You'd have to look at a Microsoft subscription of that. But for the basic version, which we all using, Microsoft 365 apps, it's all in there. And it's a little button with a star icon or a ribbon icon that you can click and then you interact with it. Now the superpower of Copilot is definitely in PowerPoint. It can generally make people's jaw drop when you start using it. You can give Copilot a Word document, a brief, a proposal, a meeting, notes, whatever, and you say, turn this into a presentation. And it does it. It reads the document, it takes the structure into the slides, it writes all the headings, bullet points, everything, and it applies a design theme and it gives you the start of a deck, not a blank one, which is awesome. Every South African who has ever sat in front of a blank PowerPoint on a Sunday night knows that having a presentation on a Monday morning is a real, genuine, usable solution. The other thing that it can also do is while you're in PowerPoint, you can ask it to do a slide on a specific topic. You can summarize it in the beginning, you can rewrite the slide information if it's too wordy, you can ask for design suggestions, it can help you prepare audience questions, it also can give you notes. It does all of that in the sidebar while you're busy using your presentation, while you're in your presentation in PowerPoint. The second tool is ChatGPT, and I actually prefer the ChatGTP Excel integration. ChatGPT is from OpenAI. You probably know the name already. I have spoken about it on past past episodes, and this is the one that everyone went viral about. It's probably the first place everyone was like, Oh, I'm using AI. And it lives in a browser. And for a long time it only lived in a browser. But that recently changed. ChatGTP has now officially released add-ons for Excel and PowerPoints. You can actually find them in the Microsoft Marketplace or on the Open AI websites. It's probably easier in the marketplace. You just go to the App Store and you insert their ChatGPT and you can install it. You'll need to sign in with your OpenAI account. So you'll need an OpenAI account. But once you're in the ChatGTP sidebar, sits on the side, and you can interact with it within your spreadsheets. So now what does it actually do in Excel for you? Let me give you a few examples. You can ask it to explain formulas you don't understand. So let's say you got a report from somebody else and there's a strange formula and you don't know how they got to that number. You can actually ask it, hey, explain this formula to me in plain English, and it can tell you what's actually happening. Then it can write a formula for you, obviously. So you can say, I want to do this calculation of all of these tabs. Can you calculate it for me in this cell? It can also do pivot tables for you. And everybody hates pivot tables. It can also do some pivot tables for you, some really complex things within your data sheet. It can also clean up messy data, find out how to sort things. It can also write a macro for you. One of my favorite things to do is to ask it to analyze the data that it sees, not just calculate it. I want it to analyze the numbers and give me trends and anomalies and things like that right there in the spreadsheet. So I don't have to copy the spreadsheet into Chat GTP to ask it. I can do it within there. For SMMEs who are managing their finances and tracking their sales, trying to make sense of all their numbers, it's genuinely powerful for that as well. Like you can say, here's all my numbers for the month, let's do a profit and loss, or let's do a report for my accountants. You just need to describe what you want to do in plain English, and then it gives it to you, which is fantastic. So, what's the third tool? The third tool is Claude for Word. And we know that Claude is made by a company called Anthropic, and this is probably one of my favorite companies at the moment. They really are thinking about integrating everything together, making it so much easier for the general Joe and Jane to use AI in an agentec way. They have released add-ons, official add-ons for Word, Excel, PowerPoint through the Microsoft Marketplace as well. So you go to the marketplace, you search for Claude, and then you can add on any of those in your relevant apps. Again, you have to add it in, you sign in, and then you can start using it from the sidebar. But the spotlight for Claude is because it is such a good writer. It is really, really good at content creation and copying. And you can make it sound exactly like you, which is fantastic. So let's say you're writing something, you write the first draft, and then you go in there and you say, okay, just correct this, make it pretty, make it fluffy, and it kind of like does it with your tone in mind, especially if you have a paid account already and it knows who you are. The two systems work together. So remember that when you add these add-ons, it's not a standalone thing, it is connected to your current system. You can also add skills and elements to these plugins or add-ons, which make a little bit more robust. So in Word, you can highlight a paragraph and ask her to rewrite it and sound more professional. You can ask her to write a first draft from bullet points that you know jotted down. You can summarize a long document, you can ask her to write a proposal for a certain demographic of people. And this is where it matters the most for South Africans, especially small businesses, because sometimes, because we have so many languages in that, we don't always know how to articulate what we're saying. And Claude can really, really help you with that. For proposals for reporting and for business plan, it's one of the best communicating tools. I really like the way that Claude writes, it's really got a professional edge to it. So let's think about these in real examples, right? There's three people, three tools, and three scenarios. Scenario number one is Tabu, who runs a small logistic company in Pretoria. Tabu has a meeting with a potential corporate client next week and he needs to create a presentation. He has a two-page Word document with all his company information that he keeps. So it'll have his pricing, his services, where he started, all his history, everything. And he goes to Copilot and he says, Please can you create a presentation for me for my company overview? He attaches the document, he gives a logo, he says it needs to be 10 slides. Um, and copilot builds him a perfect presentation and it has who we are, a contact slide, services, and everything. Tabu then tweaks a couple of things here and there because he wants it to sound more like him. Remember the golden rule of AI 80 from AI, 10% you always put your chutzpah into it. He then walks away to the meeting with a professional PowerPoint that he created like not even in 15 minutes. And he can use this moving forward. The next time he has other things he can add to the presentation using Copilot. So very, very cool way to do it. This is also great for salespeople, especially if you have a master slide. You have a master slide, you can say, I want you to create a proposal for this business doing this, bam, in your master slide is your presentation. Scenario two is Nandi. She's an HR manager at a mid-sized company in Johannesburg. She manages data for like 300 employees. Every month she has to pull a report for leadership of the turnover rates and department breakdowns, leave balances, things like that. And everything is sitting in Excel. And it was an Excel that was passed down from previous person from the previous person. So the formulas are a little bit complicated and sometimes all over the show. And half the time she doesn't even know how to read them. So what she did was she installed ChatGTP and she opens the file, she looks at the sidebar and she says, Please can you check all these formulas for me? Make sure everything is okay. If it's not okay, fix it for me. And then write me a report on the leave for the month. And bam. Next minute she had a full report, gave her a scenario of which formulas were incorrect or which ones were dated, and she had a solution that she now understood. And she could also go back into that Excel spreadsheet and say to it, please can you explain to me what this person was thinking here or there? And ChatGTP could explain it to her as well. But yeah, she was able to create a really quick report for that. And also with some confidence, knowing that someone else checked the Excel spreadsheet and that the formulas were correct. The next one is Sipu. He is a freelance writer in Cape Town and he has a big proposal to send to a new client. He's written the first draft, but it feels flat. So he says it doesn't really sound like him because he's never had a client like this before. So he installs Claude, and because he's had a profile before, Claude knows who he is. Claude understands what he writes like. So he then asks, I want you to rewrite this in a warmer tone and make it feel like a conversation. Claude rewrites it for him in a couple of minutes. He reads through it, he adjusts one or two things, and he has the proposal for the client. Took him a couple of minutes, which is fantastic. Three different tools, three different scenarios, and they were all done without leaving Microsoft Tools, which is great because we are all always using them. So, what I want you to do this week is I want you to go and try this out. Pick one of them and try it out and see what it's like and see what it can do for you. Share your experience on the socials and let us know how it worked. You don't have to become an expert overnight. It's just about opening the door and looking at what you can do and what's possible, and if it could possibly help you save time and be more efficient. So that's a wrap on this episode, AI in your Microsoft World, and all the possibilities and apps that you can connect to it now. If this episode helped you, share it with someone who is still copying and pasting from one browser to another tab. I can guarantee you they'll thank you for it. Next week, we're gonna dive into Claude specifically, uh beginner-friendly setup guide to get you started with Claude from scratch and how you can use it to create systems and AI assistance and get it to function the way that you want to function, like an actual employee. Subscribe so that you don't miss the next episode, and we'll catch you next week. I'm Maxine. This is AI for South Africa. Let's go.

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