(For Microsoft365 Users)
Your teams spend significant time filling out vendor assessment questionnaires. They have to craft answers one at a time, working through hundreds of questions, often taking days before the first draft is ready for review.
SiftHub's Autofill for MS Word cuts that time down to minutes by letting you generate answers for multiple questions simultaneously. Simply select all relevant questions, click Autofill, and watch as SiftHub automatically populates intelligent, contextual responses across your entire document in seconds. What used to take days can now be completed in a single batch operation.
Prerequisites to Autofill
To leverage SiftHub’s Autofill feature in MS Word across Browser and Desktop versions, you need to -
- Install and activate the SiftHub MS Add-in
- Ensure sufficient company knowledge is connected to SiftHub, since it will be used as a source for the Autofill. This can be in the form of uploaded Documents, Q&As or files from your connected apps such as SharePoint.
How to Autofill a questionnaire in MS Word
Steps
1. Highlight the set of questions that you wish to Autofill.
- You can highlight upto 50,000 characters (roughly 20 pages) of question text at a time.
- SiftHub will auto-detect questions from the selection, while ignoring the rest of the text (such as sections, instructions, etc). So you can highlight the full text at once.
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If your highlighted selection in an MS Word document includes tables, the Autofill modal will automatically provide specific instructions to guide you on how to correctly autofill the table.
2. Click on Autofill icon in the SiftHub Add-in, from the ribbon menu of MS Word.
3. In the Autofill modal that opens up:
- Keep the "Auto detect questions" toggle on. This will allow SiftHub to detect and shortlist the questions (from the sections, headers, instructions etc) and only respond to them. This will also allow SiftHub to read additional context from the neighbouring text (such as sections, comments, guides and instructions) that can help formulating a better response.
- Add instruction prompts to customize the formatting and content used for each Autofilled answer. These are similar to the Instruction Prompts used in 'Generate Answer' from the Browser Extension, except that they will apply to each answer that is autofilled in the activity.
- Configure the Autofill Settings for your activity
- Click Autofill.
4. SiftHub automatically detects all questions as well as neighbouring context from the spreadsheet and for each cell corresponding to a detected question, the top answer option starts getting populated in the designated answer column.
- Answers that fully address the question asked are autofilled with normal rich text formatting
- For partial answers, the response is autofilled with a yellow text highlight color in the cell to inform users to check the answer.
- Answers for which no information was found have the cell color highlighted in red to indicate that they need to fill a response there.
- Answers which are inserted in the table will take the formatting of the cell in which SiftHub inserts the answer.
Support for markdown elements in the autofilled response is not available in MS Word files currently.
The answers are autofilled one at a time, and you can track the progress of the Autofill activity in the "Activity Center" in the Browser Extension.
Note: Please keep the MS Add-in open while the Word document is being Autofilled. The Autofill process will resume if you close the MS Add-in and reopen it later. You can navigate away from the Word tab in your Browser or the Desktop version and SiftHub will continue to Autofill it in the background.
Review Autofill Answer
As the answers are being Autofilled in the document, you can start reviewing them in the Copilot -> Answer tab of the MS Add-in. From here, you can verify its sources, view alternate answers and matched Q&As, modify answer, regenerate with instruction prompts and more.
To review the answer, select the autofilled answer cell (or its corresponding question) and click on "Review" from the SiftHub Add-in ribbon menu
Ensure to select the whole autofilled answer (or its question) to be able to review it. If you click on Review Autofill Answer when the cursor is simply placed amidst an autofilled answer, SiftHub may show a "No answer associated with selection" message in the Browser Extension.
After reviewing the answer and making the necessary modifications, you can copy it back into the same place
Autofill Settings
To configure the Autofill settings for your run, click on the Settings (Gear) icon next to the Autofill button in the modal -
Autofill settings are similar to Generate answer settings which allow the user to set the language of the Autofill run, or set the Generation Mode as:
- Concise
- Standard
- Comprehensive
Changing an Generate Answer Settings in the Answer tab of the Browser Extension will not impact the Autofill Answer settings, and vice versa. However, once you have changed the Autofill settings for a specific document Autofill, it will remain applied for all subsequent Autofill runs in the same document, and will automatically reset when you try Autofill a new document.
Granting edit access of the MS Word file to SiftHub
SiftHub needs read and write access to the Word file it has to autofill to read its contents and edit the sheet programmatically
Therefore, when an Autofill is triggered, a pre-modal is shown with steps to complete a one-time setup and provide the SiftHub email address with the required access.
Steps:
1. Copy the SiftHub email address from the modal to your clipboard and click “Share” in the top right corner of the Word file.
2. In the modal that pops up when you click “Share”, paste the SiftHub service email address copied to your clipboard and provide it Editor access
Note: Ensure to complete the access setup before you click “Continue” to avoid issues arising due to insufficient permissions granted for Autofilling the document.