If you’d like to add some of your own prompts, you can customize one of the existing Google Sheets templates to do this.
What’s going on in this Google Sheet?
Before you add your own prompts, let’s go through what’s happening in the Google Sheet to help you understand how this works and what you can (and perhaps more importantly what you CAN’T) change.
Open the Google Sheet you copied earlier and let’s take a look at the Prompts tab.
It may feel like there’s a lot going on here, but let’s analyze each column, starting from the left.
- Type: Click any cell in this column, and you’ll see that you can select from two options: Action or Prompt. What’s the difference? They’re both technically prompts, but the Action shows up in the buttons on the sidebar, and the Prompts show up in the dropdown. Think of it like this: if your prompt relates to an action you perform on specific text (like rewrite this, or reword this, or summarize this, etc), then you’ll use an Action. If your prompt is something you would ask ChatGPT rather than something you’d copy and paste from a page, then you will use a Prompt.
- Title: This is the text that is displayed on the button or the dropdown option. It’s purely aesthetic, so feel free to reword these to be anything clear to you and make sense.
- Prompt: This is the actual prompt that is passed to ChatGPT, so think of this as your box where you’d typically type something you’re asking ChatGPT. If you’re using an Action type, you should include something like “do x…. with this text” since it will receive the text selected on the page. If you’re using a Prompt type, you can write your prompt just as you would in ChatGPT. If it’s a standard prompt that doesn’t need additional input or information (such as “Tell me a joke”). You can type that in the cell. If you want to pass ChatGPT any details each time you run the prompt, like “Tell me a joke about x”, you’ll do this by writing the following prompt:
Tell me a joke about [topic]This will then create a field for [topic] when you select the prompt from the dropdown, allowing you to specify a topic each time you want to run this. Look through the examples in the spreadsheet to see why this is helpful and how you might use it.
- Temperature: This can get pretty technical, but this is basically a number that tells ChatGPT how creative to be, from 0 to 1. If you make it
.1, ChatGPT won’t be very creative or make anything up, which is sometimes helpful for prompts like summarizing text. But sometimes you need ChatGPT to think out of the box if you’re asking for blog post ideas or email subject lines. In that case, you might set the temperature to1. In most cases, you’ll probably want to use1but feel free to adjust it if you’re not getting the expected results.
Now that you understand what’s happening in the Prompts tab, you can customize it as you see fit.
Removing prompts and actions from the Sheet
Finding some of the prompts in the Sheet aren’t useful? Delete ‘em! Select the row, then right-click and choose Delete row.
Don’t worry, this won’t break anything, as long as you are deleting a row (horizontal) and NOT a column (vertical), and as long as you’re not deleting the top row in any tab.
Editing prompts in the Google Sheet
You can edit any of the cells in a row if you want to change something about a prompt or action. For example, you can select the Type cell and change the value if you want to switch from a Prompt to an Action. (Note - you’ll want to adjust the prompt value as well to make sure it references “this text”.)
You can also change the title or prompt and even the temperature! So if you like some prompts but want to tweak them, go ahead!
Adding new prompts in the Google Sheet
If you want to add new prompts, add another row in your Google Sheet. Click the Type cell to select Action or Prompt.
Fill out the next cell (Title column) with the name you want to appear describing the prompt. Keep it simple but descriptive.
Add your prompt to the next cell. Remember, you can create inputs to pass through by putting them in brackets. [ ] Any text inside the bracket will be used to describe the field. For instance, if you say Tell me a joke about [topic], you’ll see a field named Topic when you select that prompt, and the value for that field will be passed in place of the bracketed variable.
Lastly, set a temperature value. This should be between 0 and 1. When in doubt, make it 1.
Go ahead and add a new prompt to your spreadsheet. If you can’t think of one, try this!
Type: Prompt
Title: Explain like I’m 5
Prompt: Explain [topic] like I’m 5
Temperature: 1
Your new row should look like this.
Saved Responses
Once you add a Google Sheet to your AI Copilot, you’ll notice a new option appear after you run a prompt. You’ll be able to save the response.
Clicking that button creates a new row in the Saved Responses tab of your Google Sheet.
You shouldn't change anything in this tab. If you want to capture more or less data, check out the optional module at the end of this course for building your own AI Copilot to gain a deeper understanding of how to use the Add a Row to Google Sheet brick.