Shortcut Formatting using AI Well, hi, I'm Brandy Lawson, and this is Elevated, the podcast helping you build a better kitchen and bath design business. In the last episode, we explored some real world examples of applying ethical AI use principles in your business. Today we're examining another powerful way AI can help streamline your workflows and save you time. Formatting. As a business owner, you know how much time and effort can go into formatting documents, tables, code, and even calendar files. It's a necessary evil. You know, ugly spreadsheets get no love, but it also can be a real drain on your productivity. That's where AI comes in. By leveraging AI tools, you can automate and simplify many of these formatting tasks, giving you back more time to focus on the high value work that truly matters. So, let's start with tables. In my own business, we often use tables to format information in proposals and internal documents. But creating and formatting these tables can be a time consuming process, especially when dealing with large amounts of data. Let's That's why I love using AI to handle this task for me. By simply dumping a bunch of paragraphs into the AI tool, I can have it generate a beautifully formatted table in seconds. And if I need to make any adjustments to the table borders or styling, AI can help with that too, saving me the headache of wrestling with Word or Google Docs. Seriously, why do they feel the need to always be moving the buttons around in the menu? Beyond tables, if you need information put into a spreadsheet, AI Or a spreadsheet formatted in a specific way, AI can help there too. From generating a menu plan, yeah, you can really do that, to outputting a sample project budget, you can have AI assist with spreadsheet generation and formatting. Another great example of using AI for formatting is calendar files. Stick with me. Recently, I needed to add my son's entire school year calendar to Google Calendar. For us, this is the way we ensure that he gets picked up at the right time and can plan for school holidays. But with early release Fridays most weeks, but not all weeks, uh, three sets of half days throughout the year, creating all those recurring events, with the exceptions, is a task I dread doing. So this year, I downloaded the ICS file from the school website, fed it into the AI tool along with details on the school day start and end times, and voila! The AI generated a new ICS file that could easily import into Google Calendar, saving me the manual work and mental exhaustion. But AI's formatting prowess doesn't stop there. It can even help with code. I used JavaScript bookmarklets in Chrome to pre fill parts of forms. But a Chrome update broke them. And I limped along for weeks, getting frustrated that my time saving hack no longer worked. I knew what I wanted the code to do, but I don't have the JavaScript skills to fix it myself. Enter AI. By explaining the issue and what I needed, an AI tool was able to update the code for me, and now my bookmarklets are working again and all feels right in the world. Well, at least in the moments that I use them every week. The key takeaway here is that AI can be an incredible tool for increasing the value of your time and attention. By outsourcing and simplifying tasks that require knowledge, time, and effort, AI frees you up to focus on the work that moves the needle for your business. So this week, I encourage you to look for opportunities to use AI for formatting in your own workflows. Whether it's tables, calendars, code, or something else entirely, there's likely an AI tool out there that can help. And if you're not sure where to start, don't worry. Search previous episodes for some great recommendations. Next week, we'll be talking about another powerful way to use AI in your business. Quickly extracting information from meeting recordings. From action items and decisions to timelines and project phases, AI can help you capture all the important details without having to try to write down all of this during the meeting or comb through a meeting recording. So be sure to tune in for that. Like what you heard? Never miss an episode by subscribing. Head over to listentoelevated. com to subscribe or share with a friend. Everyone deserves to have less stress and more impact.