okay so the plugin for word the whole goal of this plugin like the plugins for the rest of the office apps is to keep your interactions with ai really snappy really fast everything i’m about to show you could do in the claw desktop app and it would do it just fine the problem there is it’s document each time. So if I ask it to update something, it’s going to say, hey, here’s the document.

I’m going to download that document, open it, check it, and then go back and forth with the AI further. Again, download the next version of the document, check it. And so having the plugin in Word makes it really quick to make those changes because they’re happening right in front of your face. You don’t have to close the document. You don’t have to get the next version. It’ll tell you what is changing and why, and you can just kind of keep that conversation going.

Now, the other important thing to note here is that if I needed it to do some work, and then I need to go and do some work, I don’t need to use the AR, close the document, or tell it, hey, stop doing the work. Once it’s finished doing whatever I’ve asked it to do, I can crack on using the doc as normal. Nothing changed about my interaction with word.

And then at some point I might see something, “Hey, I wanna change the wording on this.” Claude’s just sitting there waiting. And so then I can get it to do some more work. And so it’s quite handy in that respect. So we’ve got a classic example here, the new starter form, right? We’ve gotten an email, we’ve got the attachment back from the guy who’s starting next week or the girl that’s starting next week.

And we need to extract those details, put it in the form so we can send it off to HR. Now I could, in theory, just do that manually. It’s not terribly difficult. However, I don’t need to do that anymore. So if I look at this document here, so this is the data this fake person has sent me back with some fake details about who they are and medical, conditions and blah blah blah great i don’t have to copy paste that anymore i can just drop and drag that in so i’m going to drag first of all open up the Claude plugin up in the top right here there it is there um and so i’m going to drop and drag that file in now so just pull it across it says hey drop files you know add them to the chat cool It’s got that PDF now.

And then I can say something really simple like, get the details for the new startup and add them into this Word document. Now, while that’s working, a couple of things to note. You might notice my spelling there wasn’t great. I kind of don’t care. I just let it go. It’s gonna pick it up. It’s gonna figure it out. It’s fine. Now, if you’re using proper nouns or something that’s a bit obscure, obviously be careful there, but I don’t need to get it exactly perfect.

It’s not going to see my tear and go, I don’t know what that means and fail. And it’s already finished doing the work before I can finish that little explanation. So there you go. So it said, hey, I’ve done all this work what I’ve done. She said she preferred pre, that’s fine. Like here’s all the details. And so it’s gonna field out that full form for us.

Now it didn’t try and do the signature bit or the name printing of who’s gonna complete it. ‘Cause again, I didn’t tell it to do that. And that’s probably something you don’t wanna just automatically fill in. And it’s got the office use only one. It didn’t try and figure out like, hey, what’s what I put there. And so you can see it’s done a pretty good job of staying in its lane.

Now, at this point I could have it do more work. Again, if you select little bits and pieces of this, you’ll notice that down here in the bottom right, it says like, hey, what have you got selected? So I could go in here and say something like, you know, I need this modified it prefers a sit stand desk, you know, change this to be more specific. The desk needs to be quite high.

I don’t know, I had a chat with her, she’s very tall. Great, it knows I have that specific piece of text, you know, updated. So there you go. Cool. It’s gone and done that and told me, hey, this is what I’ve done. Awesome. So it didn’t go off crazy modifying different bits of the document. It just modified that one piece. And so you can see there, it’s like quite easy to work with it.

It keeps your interactions with it really quick. But equally, like if I need to go off and do a bunch of work here, that’s fine like I don’t need to tell it I’ve done things and so you’ll see they’re just you know it keeps up there like hey I keep track of where I’m at just in case I wanted to do something but really easy to work with it now if you’re in a big you know big word document you’re looking at a contract you’re making changes there that’s where you would want to lock down on hey only modify this particular section so grab that you know highlight that paragraph that’s necessary there could be things in there like you could ask it to evaluate decisions in that kind of example so you know we’re looking at a contract what if I said hey Claude I want to delete this clause what are the flow-on effects what else references And it’ll go through, troll that through that document and say, Hey, you’re about to delete, you know, 0.37.

That’s actually referenced in 0.16. Cool. Now I can go and check out 0.16. What’s the impact? What do I need to do there? And so it’s quite good at not only making the edits, but you know, helping you work through those edits or kind of look through what might happen if you make an edit. And so that’s the plugin for Word. I find it incredibly useful. I haven’t yet to have a bad experience with it, which is quite, you know, I’ve been using it a fair bit.

So jump in, give it a crack, see what it can do. If you are super hesitant, whoa, I don’t want to give it, you know, production documents or anything like that, take a copy. Just throw a copy on the desktop it up, give it a crack. You know, it’s fine to do those kinds of things if you are a bit cautious about using these tools, but I would, you know, my general experience with most people is that as you get more familiar and more comfortable with it, you will offload some of that work to it.

Now, keep in mind, when you send this document back to HR, you are still accountable for those outputs, right? This isn’t about taking you out of the seat, out of the driver’s seat. We wanna make sure you’re the one still accountable for it, right? ‘Cause you can’t say, oh, you know, Claude ate my homework, but just gotta do a ton of that heavy lifting for you. So what might’ve been a five or 10 minute process to copy paste all this tedious stuff across just became a one minute check might have the pdf on one side and the word doc on the other and just eyeball it yep looks good perfect send it off so that’s the word plugin hopefully that was useful um and let’s let’s crack