A Practical Guide to Faster Email, Documents, Spreadsheets, Meetings, and Everyday Work

Read before you buy: the PDF here is a free sample — the first 20 pages of the 428-page book (payments, sales and reviews on this demo site are sample data). Get the full e-book at thenexbooks on Gumroad.

Get real work done faster with ChatGPT, without the hype and without the risk.

A large part of office work is language work: emails, reports, meeting notes, summaries, presentations, and spreadsheet formulas you only half remember. ChatGPT is very good at this kind of work when you know how to ask. The difference between a generic answer and a genuinely useful first draft is rarely technical skill. It comes down to a few habits: giving context, iterating, and checking the result before it goes anywhere important.

This book teaches those habits task by task, with prompts you can copy tomorrow morning. No technical background needed.

What's inside

• What ChatGPT is, and isn't, in plain English, plus how to set it up safely under your company's AI policy
• Prompting fundamentals: role, task, context, format, and examples, with before-and-after prompts
• Iterating and steering conversations, spotting hallucinations, and a simple verification routine
• Email: drafting, difficult replies, tone control, and summarizing long threads
• Reports, proposals, memos, policies, editing, and house style
• Meeting agendas, notes to minutes, action items, and presentations with speaker notes
• Excel and Google Sheets formulas (XLOOKUP, SUMIFS, FILTER, and more), explained and debugged
• Analyzing and cleaning spreadsheet data, turning numbers into narrative, and beginner-friendly macros and Apps Script
• Summarizing and comparing documents, researching with sources you can check, custom instructions, memory, and Projects
• Prompt libraries for your team, plus playbooks for managers, HR, sales, customer service, marketing, finance, and operations
• Custom GPTs, connecting ChatGPT to your tools, and responsible use with confidential and personal data

One realistic workplace, start to finish. You follow the team at Maplestone, a fictional home-appliance distributor, through the kind of work you do every week, ending with a full week's case study and a 30-day plan for your own job.

Honest and up to date. No invented statistics and no model-version hype. Features that depend on your plan or change over time are clearly flagged. Every chapter includes copy-ready prompts, Tips, Notes, Warnings, exercises, and Key Takeaways.

Format: PDF, 428 pages (A4), linked table of contents and bookmarks. English. First Edition, 2026. Published by thenexbooks. This book is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAI.

Table of Contents

Part I — Getting Started

• Ch 1 · What ChatGPT Is (and Isn't): A Plain-English Guide for Office Work
• Ch 2 · Getting Set Up: Accounts, Plans, Settings, Privacy, and Your Company's AI Policy
• Ch 3 · Prompting Fundamentals: Role, Task, Context, Format, and Examples
• Ch 4 · Conversations That Work: Iterating, Refining, and Steering the Output
• Ch 5 · Accuracy and Judgment: Hallucinations, Verification, and When Not to Use AI

Part II — Writing and Communication

• Ch 6 · Email: Drafting, Replying, Tone, and Inbox Triage
• Ch 7 · Business Writing: Reports, Proposals, Memos, and Policies
• Ch 8 · Editing and Rewriting: Clarity, Tone, Length, and House Style
• Ch 9 · Meetings: Agendas, Notes, Summaries, and Action Items
• Ch 10 · Presentations: Outlines, Slide Content, Speaker Notes, and Storytelling

Part III — Spreadsheets and Data

• Ch 11 · Excel and Google Sheets Formulas with ChatGPT
• Ch 12 · Analyzing Data Files: Uploading Spreadsheets, Charts, and Insights
• Ch 13 · Cleaning and Transforming Data: Text, Dates, Lookups, and Duplicates
• Ch 14 · From Numbers to Narrative: Reports, KPIs, and Dashboards
• Ch 15 · Automating Spreadsheets: Macros, VBA, and Apps Script for Non-Programmers

Part IV — Documents, Research, and Knowledge

• Ch 16 · Working with Documents: Summarizing, Comparing, and Extracting Information
• Ch 17 · Research with ChatGPT: Web Search, Deep Research, and Checking Sources
• Ch 18 · Making ChatGPT Know Your Work: Custom Instructions, Memory, and Projects
• Ch 19 · Prompt Templates and Libraries for You and Your Team

Part V — Playbooks by Role

• Ch 20 · Managers and Team Leads: Planning, Feedback, and Decisions
• Ch 21 · HR and People Operations: Hiring, Onboarding, and Policies
• Ch 22 · Sales and Customer Service: Prospecting, Proposals, and Support Replies
• Ch 23 · Marketing and Communications: Content, Campaigns, and Social Media
• Ch 24 · Finance, Operations, and Project Management: Budgets, Processes, and Plans

Part VI — Scaling Up Responsibly

• Ch 25 · Custom GPTs: Building Assistants for Repeat Tasks
• Ch 26 · Connecting ChatGPT to Your Tools: Files, Connectors, Integrations, and Agents
• Ch 27 · Responsible Use: Confidentiality, Copyright, Bias, and Company AI Policies
• Ch 28 · Case Study: A Productive Week at Maplestone

Appendices
A · Prompt Cheat Sheet
B · Prompt Templates by Task
C · Safe-Use and Quality Checklist
D · Glossary

Book details