☕ Tech Tips & Tales from The MS Office Maestro

Your weekly guided mini lesson on Microsoft, Copilot & smart working

☕ A quick note from me

Hello Reader

This week’s newsletter is a little different.

I still have a Copilot Moment and a tiny Microsoft tip for you but for “What I’ve Been Up To” I wanted to share a different kind of AI story. Not a workplace one, not a productivity hack and not another “AI saved me two hours” example.

This one involves two grandchildren, two children’s books, one very persistent frog and a copyright issue I would have completely missed.

What I’ve Been Up To

I seem to have spent the last couple of weeks disappearing down rabbit holes.

The latest one started with my five-year-old grandson Max and a simple idea. Could we use AI to help us write a story together?

A few hours later we had a mouse racing around a galaxy, AI-generated illustrations, a slightly confused plot line (it turns out writing a book in two separate sessions with a five-year-old has challenges) and me trying to work out how on earth you actually publish a children’s book.

That led me to Word, Copilot, Claude, Gemini, online publishing platforms and a great deal more image generation than I had anticipated.

Then something happened that I had not expected.

Claude stopped me. The Mouse Galaxy that Gemini had drawn for us looked an awful lot like a certain very famous mouse silhouette hanging in the sky. A copyright problem. In a bedtime story. On its way to a printer. So back to Gemini we went, to regenerate those images with a different sort of mouse.

I would have sailed straight past that one.

The result?

A real printed book called The Greatest Cheese Caper in the Galaxy is now on its way to the United States for Max.

Of course, there was another complication.

Max’s older sister Rosie is seven and absolutely loves space. There was no way I could send one grandchild a book and not the other, so I found myself creating Froggy’s Amazing Space Adventure, starring her favourite battered stuffed frog who is apparently now so fragile he isn’t allowed out of the bedroom.

Which brings me to the thing I genuinely did not expect to be the most useful part of the whole exercise. This is the prompt that created Captain Froggy.

That is a lot of words for one frog.

But that is exactly why he is the same frog on every single page. Same green, same amber eyes, same little suede fingertips, twenty-nine pictures in a row. Ask for “a cute cartoon frog in space” and you get twenty-nine different frogs and a very confused seven-year-old. The detail is not fussiness; it is the only thing keeping the book together.

Somewhere along the way I also connected Claude into my Microsoft 365 apps. I’d resisted doing that for ages because I’m a Microsoft trainer and spend most of my life inside the Microsoft ecosystem but curiosity finally won. More on that experiment another day.

What fascinated me most wasn’t that AI wrote books for me.

It didn’t.

Max provided the ideas. Rosie provided the inspiration. I still had to organise the stories, fix the problems, make the decisions and decide what I wanted the finished books to look like.

What AI did brilliantly was the heavy lifting. Creating illustrations, reorganising drafts, generating image prompts, assembling everything into a format I could actually publish and catching the one thing I had missed entirely.

So, two things I am taking away from this.

Describe what you want in far more detail than feels reasonable. That is where consistency comes from.

And let something else check the work, because Claude spotted a copyright problem that Gemini and I had both walked straight past and it would have gone to print.

Most importantly, two children will soon have books made especially for them by their Safta.

There are so many brilliant uses for AI. This was just a really lovely one. ❤️

✨ This week's Copilot Moment

Be specific enough to get a useful result

You know when you ask Copilot to “summarise this” or “draft something,” and the result is technically fine, but not quite what you wanted?

That usually isn’t because Copilot failed. It is often because the instruction was too vague.

A better prompt gives Copilot the job, the audience, the purpose and the shape of the answer you want.

Try this in Copilot:

Role: Acting as my executive briefing assistant

Goal: Summarise this document so I can brief my manager quickly

Context: My manager has 10 minutes before a meeting and needs the key points only

​Steps: Pull out the main issue, decisions needed, deadlines, risks and suggested next steps

​Expectations: Use short headings and bullet points. Keep it practical and easy to scan.

Why this helps at work

You get an answer that is closer to what you actually need, instead of something generic that you then have to reshape yourself.

Quick win: Before you ask Copilot for help today, add one sentence that explains who the output is for and what they need to do with it.

📌 A tiny Microsoft tip

Categories in Outlook

If your inbox feels busy but not all emails are equally important, categories can help you spot related messages at a glance.

They let you colour‑code emails by theme, project, or person.

Where to find it:

In Outlook, right‑click an email and choose Categorize, then select or create a colour.

Why this helps

Your inbox becomes easier to scan and important messages stand out without needing folders or flags.

Try this today: Create one category for a key project or person and apply it consistently for a week.

Coming up: Excel with Copilot webinar

If Excel is one of those apps you use because you have to, not because you love it, this session is for you.

I’ll be showing practical ways to use Excel more confidently, including how Copilot can help you understand your data, ask better questions, spot patterns and get started when you’re not sure what to do next.

No jargon, no scary formulas, just useful examples you can take back to work.

​Excel with Copilot ​

And finally

Sometimes the best way to understand AI is not to start with the biggest work problem on your desk. Sometimes it is to try something small, creative and slightly ridiculous, then notice what you learn along the way.

This week, mine involved a mouse galaxy, a space frog and two very loved grandchildren.

Have a lovely week,

Shelley

✍️ Shelley Fishel

The MS Office Maestro​
Expert-led, human-centered Microsoft 365 training