You’re Not Unlocking ChatGPT’s Full Potential. Here’s How to Do It.
How to make the most of your ChatGPT subscription.
ChatGPT Plus has features that only a few make the most of. These aren’t hidden features that only I have the privilege to have but are available to any Plus subscriber. They’ll help you simplify prompt engineering, improve ChatGPT responses, and do more with GPT-4.
Here are some ways to make your ChatGPT Plus subscription more valuable.
Note: The video below is similar to this article but dedicated to data analysts.
#1 When you can’t type, talk with ChatGPT
There are moments when we want to use ChatGPT but we’re not in front of a computer. In such situations, what we can do is use the ChatGPT app on our phones.
Why? There’s an exclusive feature in the iOS/Android app that allows us to talk with ChatGPT: Voice. With this feature, we don’t have to pick up our phones and text to interact with ChatGPT but we can simply put on earphones and speak.
Here’s where to find this feature on the phone app.
What can you do with it?
You can discuss/explore topics as if you were chatting with a friend or professor
You can simulate a job interview as if you were with a real interviewer
You can practice a foreign language as if you were with a language buddy
Those are just a few ways I use the Voice feature. You can find more useful ways on your own by using ChatGPT on your phone.
#2 Create your own custom instructions
As ChatGPT users, we sometimes complain about the quality of the responses of ChatGPT, but we forget that there’s a feature we can use to improve ChatGPT responses: custom instructions.
Just remember that you need to develop custom instructions that fit your needs.
I say this because there are many sites out there that offer hundreds of personas for ChatGPT’s Custom Instructions. You can use those templates as starting points and adapt them to your needs. I learned this lesson when taking a ChatGPT for Data Analytics course. The instructor developed custom instructions that were great for the course but wouldn’t be as useful for every single data analyst.
I took a few of his instructions to develop my own. Below are the instructions I took from the template.
When generating visualizations, prioritize the following:
- Utilize Seaborn over Matplotlib
- Always use a dark theme/background [e.g., sns.set(style="darkgrid")
plt.style.use("dark_background")]
- For bar charts, always order high to low
- For color palettes, prioritize the following:
1. "Blues_r" - use for sequential and comparison (don't use "Blues_d")
2. "Bright" - use for qualitative analysis onlyAs a data analyst, I took those instructions to customize the visualizations that ChatGPT generates. Regardless of your profession, don’t forget to create instructions that fit your needs.
#3 Don’t overlook GPTs
When GPTs were introduced they were seen as a mere replacement for plugins, but they’re more powerful than you think.
One of my favorite GPTs is Scraper. This GPT allows me to extract data from websites with a simple prompt. You only need to give the link, specify the data you want to extract, and voila! You’ll get the data in seconds.
Say I want to extract data inside all the tables from this site. I just need to start a chat with Scraper and use a simple prompt.
You see? No need to use complex prompt engineering techniques with GPTs because they’re designed to understand and respond to natural language.
If you’re a data analyst like me you might find the GPTs below useful.
Data Analyst: Better than the “analysis” feature within GPT-4. It generates reports, visualizations, cleans data, and more.
Excel GPT: Generates Excel formulas for you from scratch.
And if you’re not a data analyst, just explore the GPT Store. The store has different sections such as writing, productivity, research, lifestyle, and programming with dozens of GPTs that will help you do more with ChatGPT.
Bonus: Thanks to a feature called GPT Mentions, you can even combine multiple GPTs in a single chat by using the @ symbol in the chatbox!
#4 Don’t forget: ChatGPT supports different output formats
Let’s continue with the previous example. We extracted data from a website using a GPT but now we need that data on an Excel file. How to download it?
You could use a GPT called Data Analyst to export the table as an Excel file, but sometimes you might encounter errors (GPTs are unpredictable sometimes). In these cases, you can ask ChatGPT to output the table as CSV.
ChatGPT won’t give you a link to download the file but will output the data in a format that is compatible with your software of choice.
In this case, you can click on “Copy code,” open a TXT file, paste the code, and save it as CSV. Next time you open the file, it’ll be nicely organized in Excel.
Other formats ChatGPT can output are code snippets, markdown, LaTeX (math formulas), HTML, and JSON.
Bonus: Using ChatGPT Vision at work or school
Picture this: You’re working in Microsoft Word and suddenly you need to insert a math formula in a fancy format like the one below.
If you’re no Word expert like me, you’d take a screenshot of the formula and paste it directly to Word. That’s fine, but if the Word document is meant for a scientific paper or work report, they’ll ask you to insert the equation using Word’s formulas.
The problem is that most people don’t know the syntax to create such formulas. The solution? Upload the screenshot to ChatGPT and ask it to generate the formula for you.
In the prompt, I ask ChatGPT to “translate the formula to latex.” LaTeX is the language used to create these formulas. ChatGPT will write the LaTeX code for you and you simply have to copy and paste it to Word.
You can also write the math symbol/formula on a piece of paper or a whiteboard, take a photo, and give it to ChatGPT.
Another way I use Vision at work is at meetings. I just give ChatGPT the photos of dashboards or anything written on the whiteboard to analyze the content.
That’s it! Now you know more ways to make the most of your ChatGPT Plus subscription.