Excel/Spreadsheet Automation: 5 Ways to Process Data with AI

What is the most time-consuming task in the workplace? It's not meetings, not business trips, but 'writing things.' Email replies, weekly/monthly reports, meeting minutes, project proposals, contract reviews, notices, and announcements—an average office worker spends over 3 hours a day on written work. The good news is, AI can now help you complete 80% of the initial draft work, transforming you from a 'writer' into an 'editor.'

AI Business Writing: From Emails to Proposals

Email Writing: Craft a Professional Email in 3 Minutes

Email is the foundation of workplace communication, but many people spend far more time on it than necessary. This is especially true for formal business emails, cross-departmental coordination emails, and client communication emails—they require appropriate wording, clear logic, and no typos. AI can compress this process from 30 minutes to 3 minutes.

**Practical Method**: Provide ChatGPT or Claude with three key pieces of information: ① Email purpose (request, notification, reply, thanks, etc.); ② Key content points (summarize what you need to say in 2-3 sentences); ③ Tone requirement (formal/semi-formal/friendly). AI will generate a complete, professionally worded email draft.

**Email Prompt Template**: "Please help me write a [email type] email. The recipient is [position/relationship]. The background is [brief background]. Need to express/request [core content]. The tone should be [formal/friendly/tactful]. If there are attachments, please remind the recipient to check them."

**Quick Reference for Common Email Scenarios**: Follow-up for a reply (tactful reminder + clear deadline), rejecting a request (thanks + explanation of reasons + offering alternatives), cross-departmental coordination (clear requirements + timelines + responsible parties), responding to customer complaints (apology + solution + follow-up commitment), post-meeting follow-up (summary of decisions + action items + next meeting). Create a Prompt template for each scenario for direct reuse later.

Weekly & Monthly Reports: Let AI Help You Summarize

Writing weekly reports is one of the most painful weekly tasks for many professionals. It's not because it's difficult to write, but because you need to distill a week's messy work into a structured summary and highlight achievements. AI can help you complete this process efficiently.

**Optimal Workflow**: ① Use your phone notes or Lark Docs to record 2-3 sentences about what you did each day (takes 30 seconds); ② Paste the week's records to AI on Friday; ③ Use the Prompt: "Based on the following work records, help me write a weekly report. Categorize by project, listing completed items and next week's plans for each project. Highlight key achievements and data, with a professional and concise tone."; ④ Spend 5 minutes reviewing and editing AI's draft. The entire process shortens from the previous 1-2 hours to 15 minutes.

**Monthly reports and year-end summaries** work the same way. AI is particularly good at extracting structure and highlights from a large amount of fragmented records. You just need to provide the raw material, and AI will organize it into a logically clear, data-highlighted report. For year-end summaries, feed the 12 monthly reports to AI to generate an annual summary, then manually adjust the focus points—efficiency increases 10-fold.

Meeting Minutes: From Recording to Structured Document

Meeting minutes are another high-frequency pain point. The traditional method is to take notes while the meeting is happening, but this both hinders participation in the discussion and easily misses key information. AI's solution is 'record first, organize later.'

**Recommended Toolchain**: Lark Minutes (top domestic choice, automatic transcription + AI summary), Tongyi Tingwu (by Alibaba, high Chinese recognition accuracy), Otter.ai (top choice for English meetings), Tencent Meeting AI Assistant (integrated within Tencent Meeting). These tools can automatically convert meeting recordings into transcripts, then use AI to extract key information.

**AI Organization Prompt**: "Please organize the following meeting transcript, extracting: 1. Meeting topic and participants 2. Main discussion topics (categorized by topic) 3. Key discussion points and differing opinions for each topic 4. Decisions made 5. Action items (including responsible person and deadline) 6. Unresolved issues and next meeting arrangements. Output format in markdown."

AI-Assisted Report & Proposal Writing

Project Proposals & Plans

AI is particularly good at generating proposal frameworks and drafts. A complete project proposal typically includes: background analysis, goal setting, implementation plan, budget estimation, risk assessment, expected outcomes. The traditional method takes 1-3 days; using AI, you can complete a high-quality draft in 2-3 hours.

**Proposal Writing Prompt**: "Please help me write a [project type] proposal. Background: [company/department current situation]. Goal: [problem to solve/effect to achieve]. Budget range: [approximate amount]. Timeline: [estimated duration]. Please include: project background, goals & KPIs, implementation steps & schedule, resource requirements, budget breakdown, risks & mitigation, expected ROI."

**Key Technique**: Don't expect AI to give you a perfect proposal in one go. The correct approach is: first, let AI generate the framework and draft → you review if the framework is reasonable → have AI expand details chapter by chapter → you supplement internal data and professional judgment → finally adjust tone and formatting. This 'human-AI collaboration' method is 3-5 times faster than writing purely by hand and results in a more complete structure.

Contract & Legal Document Review

AI can help you quickly review contracts and flag potentially risky clauses. While AI cannot replace a lawyer's professional judgment, it can help you perform preliminary screening before sending it to a lawyer, saving significant time and legal fees.

**Review Prompt**: "Please review the following contract content and help me flag: 1. Clauses unfavorable to our side 2. Vague or unclear wording 3. Missing common protective clauses 4. Analysis of liability for breach and compensation clauses 5. Suggested revisions and modification advice."

Multilingual Translation & Cross-Border Communication

AI Translation vs. Traditional Translation Tools

Google Translate and DeepL are good at 'literal translation,' but often lack naturalness in business contexts. The advantages of ChatGPT and Claude translation are: ① Understanding contextual meaning (business emails vs. technical documents vs. marketing copy, the tone is completely different); ② Ability to specify translation style (formal/colloquial/academic); ③ Ability to translate into multiple language versions at once.

**Translation Prompt Template**: "Please translate the following Chinese into [target language]. This is a [business email/product introduction/technical document], and the readers are [target audience]. Translation requirements: ① Use natural, idiomatic language, avoid translationese; ② Use standard terminology for the [industry]; ③ Maintain the [formal/friendly] tone of the original."

Cross-Border Business Communication in Practice

If you need to communicate with overseas colleagues or clients, AI is your best 'language coach.' It can not only translate content but also help you understand the subtext in their emails (e.g., polite refusals, subtle hints to hurry in business English). You can even have AI check your reply emails for culturally sensitive expressions.

Office Writing Tool Comparison & Selection

Notion AI

Notion AI is deeply integrated into the Notion workspace. Its biggest advantage is generating new content based on your existing notes and documents. Suitable for: knowledge base management, meeting minutes organization, project documentation writing. An extra $10/month, suitable for teams already using Notion.

Microsoft Copilot

Copilot is integrated into Word, Outlook, and Teams, providing AI assistance directly within your document writing process. Its biggest advantage is seamless integration into existing Office workflows. Suitable for: Word document writing, Outlook email replies, Teams meeting summaries. $30/user/month (Enterprise version), suitable for heavy Microsoft 365 users.

General AI Assistants (ChatGPT/Claude)

Highest flexibility, not limited to specific platforms. Suitable for: almost all writing tasks. The downside is needing to switch and copy between AI tools and office software. Recommended to use with browser extensions (like Monica, Sider) to reduce switching costs. ChatGPT Plus $20/month, Claude Pro $20/month.

Building a Personal Prompt Template Library

The key to AI writing efficiency is not writing Prompts from scratch every time, but building a set of reusable templates. It is recommended to organize them into the following categories:

**Daily Communication**: Email reply templates (follow-up/refusal/thanks/follow-up), instant message templates (work assignments/progress reports). **Reports & Summaries**: Weekly report template, monthly report template, meeting minutes template, project summary template. **Proposal & Creation**: Project proposal framework, marketing plan framework, competitor analysis framework. **Translation & Polishing**: Business translation template, document polishing template, grammar check template.

Store these templates in Notion, Lark Docs, or a dedicated text file. When using them, copy the template and fill in the specific information. As you use them more, your template library will become richer, and your AI writing efficiency will increase.

After mastering AI document writing, the next chapter will cover data analysis and automation—how to use AI to process Excel data and build automated workflows, completely freeing you from repetitive tasks.