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If you have been using a computer, browsing the internet, watching the news or doing just about anything, you probably know about all the AI (Artificial Intelligence) hype going on these days. There are many companies trying to become leaders in the AI field by releasing things such as chatbots, image and video creation tools and even virtual girlfriends!
Microsoft is doing their best to integrate their Copilot AI tools into their software such as Windows 11, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and even their Edge web browser. They have even started adding Copilot functionality into the Notepad text editing app. In this article, we will be discussing the Windows Notepad Rewrite with AI Copilot feature.
As you probably know, Notepad has been around since the beginning of Windows and is used for many things such as taking simple notes, text editing, code and script writing, log files and creating things such as batch files. So, if you use Notepad on a regular basis, you may want to check out the Rewrite with AI feature to see if it can help you improve your work.
When you open Notepad, you should see the Rewrite icon at the upper right of the Notepad window. When you click on the icon, you will have several options to choose from. The change tone and change format options will have additional choices if you expand on them.
Here is what each option can do.
Rewrite – This will read the entire content of the Notepad file and rewrite it for you based on what it finds in the text.
Make shorter – This can summarize your text to make it shorter. Just be sure it doesn’t remove any information that you need to keep.
Make longer – This will expand on your existing text to make it longer by analyzing the content using natural language processing (NLP) to identify key ideas, context, and tone.
Change tone – This will change the overall feel of your text based on which tone option you select. You can choose from formal, casual, inspirational or humor.
Change format – This will adjust the structure or style of your text to better suit specific needs or applications. You can choose from paragraph, list, business, academic, marketing or poetry.
One thing to keep in mind when using the Rewrite feature is that it requires Copilot AI credits so you will need to be signed into the Notepad app with a Microsoft account that allows you to use this feature. If you are not signed in at all or not signed in with the correct type of account, you will see as message as shown below telling you that a subscription is required to use the Rewrite feature. Even if you are signed in with the right type of account, you may see this message if you do not have enough credits. We have seen this message pop up even when having AI credits and you can get around it by clicking the OK button and trying again. This appears to be a bug and hopefully it will get fixed soon.
When it comes to AI credits, Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers get 60 AI credits per month, which can be used across various applications that support Copilot AI features. Copilot Pro subscribers can use AI features without worrying about credit limits.
The image below shows the Notepad file we will be working with. The text is a simple explanation of Windows network types.
We will now use the first option, which is Rewrite, to see what Copilot can do with our existing text. Once the rewrite process is complete, Copilot will show the results in a separate window for us to review.
If we like the results, we can click the Replace button to have our text replaced with the rewritten text. The 1 of 3 section is used to show other versions of the results that we can use if we like one of them better. The other buttons can be used to copy the text, regenerate the results, discard the results, check your AI credits and flag the generated content as inappropriate.
Above these options you will see other options for length, tone and format. These are the same options you saw earlier but you can use them to have these types of changes applied to the results.
For our next example, we will have Rewrite change the format to a list style. Your results will vary based on your original text so using a list style for example probably wont work too well on a paragraph about your dog.
For our next example, we will apply the poetry format even though our original text is not something that would work well for a poem. Regardless, Copilot will do its best to make a poem out of our text as seen below.
If you do not ever plan on using the Notepad Rewrite with AI Copilot feature, you can click on the gear icon to go to the Notepad settings and disable the feature. Plus, you can use the older version of Notepad in Windows 11 if you prefer that.
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