Impacts of AI on Document Preparation Software
Microsoft Copilot Logo Via Adobe Stock
For all scholars and many professionals, document preparation is an essential part of their jobs. Having proper and neatly-presented documents is a standard in all academic journals, and many journals’ guidelines even restrict submissions to be only made with established document preparation systems such as Microsoft Word and LaTeX. In The Scientist, scholars François Brischoux and Pierre Legagneux even stated that “[one] could get the impression that article formatting has become as important as the scientific content to the journals.”
Despite its significance and prevalence in academic and professional fields, document preparation has stayed the same throughout all our modern technological revolutions in software. Microsoft Word and LaTeX have been the industry standards for document preparation for as long as documents have been made on computers, and while many features have been added, neither of these software ever stepped out of the bounds of what document preparation software looked like three decades ago. However, it seems that AI is finally breaking through these bounds, bringing us revolutionized document preparation software.
In March of this year, Microsoft announced Microsoft 365 Copilot, the AI productivity tool that will be integrated in Microsoft 365 apps including Microsoft Word. Microsoft has described this new tool as “reinventing productivity,” and this bold claim hardly seems like an overstatement with just a glimpse of its features. In Microsoft’s blog, it was revealed that Copilot can “help you improve your writing with suggestions that strengthen your arguments or smooth inconsistencies,” “rewrite sections or the entire document to make it more concise,” and even “create a first draft for you” with “only a brief prompt.” Now, these features so far are arguably revolutionizing productive writing rather than document preparation. As a large language model, it is true that a lot of its strength is in writing. But Copilot has another trick up its sleeve—one feature that promotes it from being a powerful writing assistant to the first-ever document preparation game-changer—data.
Copilot has access to data from Microsoft Graph and other Microsoft 365 apps, and this has potential to be very powerful combined with a large language model. Entire documents can be automatically generated with figures using real information in your other apps such as Microsoft Excel. A demo from Microsoft shows that you can prompt Copilot in formats such as Draft a project proposal based on the data from [a document] and [a spreadsheet], creating documents with data from your other apps that Copilot automatically interprets. This feature alone is more revolutionary for document preparation software than anything that has come before, and this is only the infancy of AI’s application!
Copilot Demo Via Microsoft Blog
Of course, the world is not changing overnight. Copilot is not yet available to general users, and it is speculated that it won’t be released until the beginning of 2024. And even with Copilot’s release, many academics will continue to use the old software simply because of Microsoft Word’s current disadvantages to other software such as the inability to easily write complex mathematical expressions, OS-compatibility (Microsoft Word does not work on Linux), and the fact that it is commercial software opposed to free and open-source software like LaTeX. Until LaTeX also adopts similar AI-powered features or a completely new LaTeX-like software using AI is introduced, it will be a while before everyone is creating documents with AI. Nevertheless, it is an incredibly exciting time to see so many aspects of our lives—even the parts that have stayed the same for so long—are being transformed by the wonderful technology of AI.