Don't Use ChatGPT Until You Watch This Video

By now, you've probably started using ChatGPT, right? It's not rocket science. Anyone can  ask questions, and it's going to give you answers.

In school, we learned that there  are no bad questions. In ChatGPT world, there are. It's not going to tell you that, but it's  going to give you poor quality answers, and you're just going to waste a lot of time going  back and forth.

I've been there—super annoyed—so I decided to spend some time to find the best  prompts to get the most out of ChatGPT. My first tip for you is to take advantage of  custom instructions, which you're going to find by clicking on your profile icon. So, when you go  to custom instructions, you have the ability to hand over a note to ChatGPT that explains who you  are, what you want, and how you want ChatGPT to respond.

This way, you won't have to repeat  your preferences in every single conversation. So, the first question is: what would  you like ChatGPT to know about you to provide better responses? It helps if you  can provide some context about yourself.

So, for example, if you're a teacher,  let it know. If you're a student, an accountant, a lawyer, let it know. This  way, you can get responses that are more relevant to your line of work.

If you want  responses that are relevant to your region, tell it where you live. Not the exact address,  but just the area where you are. So, for example, you could say, "I'm a software developer based in  Chicago working with Python.

" Or you could say, "I'm a marketing professional in New York writing  advertising copy. " Right, you get the idea. The next question is: how would you like  ChatGPT to respond?

We get some thought starters, like how formal or casual should  ChatGPT be? For example, you could put in, "Language and tone should be friendly and  casual. " You can decide if ChatGPT can have opinions on topics or remain neutral, and if  responses should be long or short.

And this can really make a difference because you can  get rid of a lot of frustrating back and forth. So, for example, let's say you're good in  Excel and use ChatGPT to help you out when you get stuck, but you don't like seeing all  those explanations about the solutions. So, what you could write is, "When I ask for Excel  formulas, just provide the most efficient formula without any explanation.

" If you were a programmer  and you didn't want to see all those programming explanations, you could type in, "When I ask  you for code, just give me the most efficient code with code snippets without additional  explanation. " Right, so that's really helpful. In this case, I'm picky about Excel formulas. 

I'm going to leave this in and click on Save. Now, let's go and start a new chat, and I'm  going to ask it for a formula just to make sure this works. Let's say I'm in Excel, and I'm  struggling with updating this formula.

Currently, it's returning everything that's greater than  12,000, but I want to change this to be between 12,000 and 15,000. And I have no idea  how to tell it to do it between these values. I'm going to go back to  ChatGPT and type in my formula, tell it to update this Excel formula so it returns  values in the B column that are between these two.

And when I send this, it just provides  the solution without any explanation. Now, without that custom setting, this is what  I would get. And sometimes you would just end up with a lot longer explanations  like this one.

These are great if you don't know your way around, but if  you do, they can be pretty annoying. Another thing that could be quite helpful is  to tell ChatGPT to always inform us about the confidence level of its answer. This could  be quite helpful for factual topics.

Now, we can also expand on this and say, "When  your answer includes facts, always provide a valid URL with the source for your answer.  And if you speculate or predict something, inform me. " Okay, so let's test  this out.

I'm going to save this, go ahead and start a new chat, and let's ask  it over the FIFA World Cup winners of the '90s. When I run this, I get: 1990: West Germany, Brazil, France. Confidence level is high, and I get a list  of valid URLs directly from FIFA.

com. Right, so these settings can be really helpful.  I'm sure you're going to find them handy.

Now let's move on to prompts. The  first one is to write like you. So, if you ask ChatGPT to write some text for you,  the results will probably sound a bit generic, right?

Even if you're emphasizing  the custom instructions and the tone and the style that you want, it might not  properly reflect your style of writing. Now, the good news is that you can teach it to write  in your own style by giving it some examples. So, first, we're going to explain to ChatGPT  what we're going to do with this prompt.

"I'd like you to help me write articles from  my productivity blog. " Just replace this with whatever type of blog or article you need.  "First, I want you to understand my writing style based on examples that I give you.

You'll  save my writing style under 'LG_STYLE. '" Now, this makes it easier to refer to later. "After  that, you'll ask me what the topic of my specific content is.

You'll then write the article  using LG_STYLE. " Okay, so let's give it a try. Okay, so it understands what we're trying to do  and it's ready for some examples.

I'm just going to go and grab some copy from my website. Let's  copy this paragraph from the About page and paste it in as example one of LG_STYLE. Now I'll give  it a second example of LG_STYLE.

I'll just go and grab the other copy from here, and paste it  in. So, it summarized my style as informative, personable, and aims to establish a connection.  And now it's ready to write our content.

So, I want to write an article about the  importance of daily coffee for productivity. Cool, start writing it in my personal writing  style, the one that it previously saved. Now, you can, of course, continue working  on this and make it better.

You can also come back to this chat and ask  it to write other related articles. And by the way, if you love your daily coffee,  subscribe to this channel because we all love coffee around here. Next up is self-critic. 

So, another great option is to ask ChatGPT to review its own text and provide feedback. Now,  it sounds funny, but it really works well. So, let's say I asked ChatGPT to provide me with a summary  of why Python and Excel can work well together and it comes up with this reply which I'm not really  happy with.

So, I'm going to ask it to act as a critic. Be ruthless, analyze the text, and tell me  where it can be better. It will go over the reply and provide step-by-step feedback on potential  issues.

For example, with clarity and how adding specific examples could make the summary better,  how we could highlight specific capabilities. It also went ahead and revised this original  reply, giving examples of Python's strengths and Excel's strengths. From there, you can further  improve on this reply by asking it to specifically emphasize and include some of the previous  pointers that it gave us.

It's pretty cool, right? Next up is self-prompting. So, how about using  ChatGPT to self-prompt to optimize its own prompt?

Here's how you can do that. So, let's say I want  to send an email to my team encouraging them to participate in our team-building event. To get the  perfect prompt, I could ask ChatGPT, "Write five perfect ChatGPT prompts that will really show  off the power of ChatGPT.

Focus the prompts around writing an email to my team encouraging  them to participate in our team-building event. Before you write anything, ask me questions until  you're sure you can create the optimal prompts. " It will usually come back with some questions  about the topic, in this case, about the purpose, dates, and locations and other useful information. 

Now, after I provide my answers, so, for example, for any particular incentives or benefits, I've  put "nice dinner, nice breakfast, no work," then I send this off, and it creates five possible  prompts for me. Now, these are prompts that will help me get the best reply. So, one is, "Drft an  email to your creative team encouraging them to join a special team-building event.

Mention the  importance of taking a break from work. " Another one is, "Compose an email inviting your team to  a casual and fun team-building event. Stress the importance of building strong relationships within  the group and the opportunity for a nice dinner.

" Okay, so I like number three better. I'm just  going to tell it to use it. Now it just provides me with a prompt, but I actually want it to run  it.

So can I do it? It starts writing the email. Now, we can see it has a nice subject, the tone  is soft and casual, and it's highlighting the bonding and relationships.

Right, so we  can see it sprinkled in different places, like we can share stories, laughter,  and delicious food. We'll have a great breakfast. There's no work, no deadlines. 

So, it's a very customized email. Now, compare this to a case where  I don't optimize the prompt. So, I tell it to write an email to my team to  participate in our team-building event.

It's no surprise that I get a very generic email about  team-building and what generally team-building events are designed to do. So, as you can see,  self-prompting can give you a much better output. But you can also take this self-prompting a step  further.

So, if you go back to the step where we got the different prompts, we could ask it why  a prompt would work well. It gives me detailed information about the reasons it thinks this  prompt is effective, but I'm not so sure. So, I'm going to ask it, "which prompt do you find the  best?

" It tells me that prompt three effectively combines the key elements I provided, so it  could work well in my case, which it actually did. Often when you ask ChatGPT to write something,  the reply can be rather long. So, one way to avoid this is to tell it from the beginning to stick to a specific word count.

Now, if this is something that you want in every single reply, you can add it to your  custom settings. If not, you can add it to your prompt. So, for example, we want to know the  advantages of using XLOOKUP over VLOOKUP in Excel.

I'm going to add that the maximum length of  the text should be 500 words. A few moments later. Okay, so let's double-check.

I'll copy this, go to a new page, type in "word. new" to open a blank Word document in the browser, and paste in the text. We can see  down here that we have 469 words.

Now, another alternative is to tell it to reduce the  length of a text that it already gave you. So, a good prompt for that is, "Now, say the same  thing more concise and prefer using only 60% as many words or whatever percentage you need. You  could try cutting it down even more, step by step, until you get the crispiness that you like. 

Your audience is going to be thankful for it. " Specify the output format. ChatGPT has many  different output formats, not just plain text.

So, for example, you can tell it to give you  the response in a table format. Let's say, "Create a table with the winners of the FIFA  World Cups between 1990 and 2018. The headings should be year, winner, and runners-up.

" So, we  get a table. We can just highlight the content, use the shortcut Ctrl+C to copy it, move over to  an Excel sheet, and paste the table with Ctrl+V. Now, alternatively, you can tell it to output  the table as CSV.

Then all you need to do is to copy the code from here and paste it into a text  editor, and then save it as a CSV file extension. Now, if you need this, let's say for  your website, you could output as HTML. Moments later.

. . I'm just going to test this out.

So, I'm  going to grab this code and paste it on our site in an HTML editor. Then, when  I go to preview, I can see the table, but it doesn't look really nice. I'd  rather have borders and spacing.

So, let's improve the prompt and ask it to add  the borders and spacing. Later that night. Now, when I replace the code, I have a table that's a lot easier to read.

Right? So, you can also ouput in different format like JSON or XML. Or if you need it as a Pandas data frame, you can do that as well.

Just give it a try. SO, these are some tips to get the most out of  ChatGPT or any large language model AI, actually. It really comes down to the old principle:  garbage in, garbage out.

Keep this in mind, and you'll definitely make better use of these  new tools. I hope you found this helpful. Do subscribe if you aren't subscribed yet, and  I'm going to catch you in the next video.