Only Using ChatGPT as a 'Document Summarizer'? 10 Practical Ways to Use It
I use ChatGPT every day at work, but most people seem to stop at just "asking any question and getting an answer." Here are the ways I actually find useful in my real work.
1. Email tone conversion: When you're angry or dealing with something stressful, just say, "Rewrite this email in a more polite business tone," and you're done.
2. Automatic meeting minutes: Extract the text from a Zoom recording, then say, "Summarize the key decisions and action items in a table." That's it. You can wrap it up in 5 minutes after the meeting.
3. Acting as a beginner SQL writer: Say, "This is Excel data, pull it out under these conditions," and it writes the SQL for you. Of course, you need to verify it yourself.
4. Code review persona: Assign it a role like, "You're a senior reviewer. Find bugs and improvements in this code," and you get quite sharp feedback.
5. Excel formula generation: When you need a complex conditional formula and feel stuck, just explain it in plain language and it completes the formula for you.
6. Writing English letter (cover/summary): Great for putting together proposal cover pages or resume summaries.
7. Contract clause comparison: Ask it to organize the differences between two versions' clauses into a table, and it does a surprisingly good job.
8. Idea brainstorming: When you need "variety"—product names, campaign slogans, article angles—ask it to generate 20 at once.
9. Learning roadmap: When you come across an unfamiliar concept, say, "Create a 3-month curriculum from beginner to advanced," and you get a plan.
10. Emotional support: When you're working late and want to hear "hang in there," just have GPT role-play with you. It's more healing than you'd expect lol.
Of course, all results need editing. Especially meeting minutes and contracts, I always double-check them myself. Still, if you work these into your routine, your productivity definitely changes.
10 answers
Agreed, the email tone converter is really useful lol
Summarizing meeting minutes is awesome, but we need to consider security. If the company prohibits external data transfer, we can't use it.
I've tried SQL delegation myself, and there are more errors than expected. Still, it's good for rough drafts.
Oh, I didn't know about this. Especially the part about assigning a persona—I should give that a try.
Well... doesn't everyone already do that? For something claiming to be 10 tips, it's just a collection of basics.
Excel formulas are a whole new world. I even use pivot tables to organize things.
When using English Lift, adding the condition 'not too exaggerated' makes it come out more realistic. Recommended.
Isn't the "5-minute meeting minutes" claim a bit of an exaggeration? Even if you can organize the notes themselves, the time for participants to review is a separate matter.
When summarizing long documents, I have it create a table of contents first. The quality of the summary changes drastically.
For #1, the email tone conversion produced awkward expressions for company use, so I ended up revising everything myself. I think it's better to just use it as a reference.