Best practices for giving Copilot M365 large files (PDF, Excel and Word)

[staverac]

Hello everyone,

I want to know if there are any best practices for delivering good summaries for large files while working with Copilot. I have tried to do summaries from PDFs with Copilot in Word and it gives me the message "file is too large for Copilot to process", it takes only the first part of the file.

When I tried this type of case in Excel files that have a lot of information and the message is about the same. "This table is too big to analyze trends".

The question is, how can I work with large files or, are there any best practices for dividing files so I can use Copilot prompts with them?

Thanks!

[#2 · Accepted solution]

For scenarios where the entire document context is needed for Copilot to provide answer, a couple of good rules of thumb on the length of the document you provide to Copilot:
1.Shorter than 20 pages: Try to keep the length of the document you refer to under 20 pages. This is a comfortable length for Copilot to handle.
2.Around 15,000 words or less: For those who love word counts, aim to stay at or below 15,000 words. This is a sweet spot for Copilot to work effectively.


Here are some ways that you can use longer documents with Copilot:
1.Break It Down: If you have a long document, consider splitting it into smaller documents and providing them to Copilot separately. This way, Copilot can handle each part effectively.
2.Summarize in Parts: For long reports or manuscripts, you can try summarizing them in chunks with Copilot. Today you can do that by copying/pasting chunks into separate documents and summarizing sections separately. This helps Copilot to give you more precise and relevant responses.

[#3]

Copilot in Excel has a limitation of working 2 million cells. Unfortunately need to break down the data to be under that cap. Even large sets will slow it down if it is under the cap. You could use show data insights as a prompt to see what trends it can find for you.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/frequently-asked-questions-about-copilot-in-excel-7a13758...