Your first real task
A worked example, from a vague brief to something you would actually send.
"Hello, what can you do" teaches you nothing. Let us do a real job instead.
The scenario. You have a spreadsheet of last quarter's campaign results and your manager wants "a summary, with a chart, by Thursday". Classic.
Attach the file
Click the paperclip in the message box and pick your spreadsheet. A small card appears above where you type, showing the file name and how many sheets it has.
If the file has several sheets, Asteria asks which ones to use. Pick only what is relevant. Feeding it three irrelevant sheets is how you get a confidently wrong answer.
Say what you actually want, not what you want it to do
The instinct is to write "summarise this". That gets you a summary of what a stranger would find interesting, which is rarely what you need.
Write the brief you would give a junior colleague:
This is our Q3 campaign spend and results by channel. My manager wants a short summary for the leadership meeting. Tell me which channels performed best and worst on cost per lead, call out anything that looks like a data problem rather than a real result, and give me a bar chart of cost per lead by channel.
Three things happened there, and they are the whole trick:
- You said what the file is. Column headers are often cryptic. One sentence of context is worth more than any clever prompting.
- You said who the answer is for. "For the leadership meeting" produces very different writing from "for my own notes".
- You asked it to be sceptical. "Call out anything that looks like a data problem" is the single most useful instruction in this guide. It is the difference between an answer and a checked answer.
Watch what it does
You will see it working: reading the file, running numbers, drawing the chart. Those steps are not decoration. If it says it read a sheet you did not intend, stop it and say so.
Push back
The first answer is a draft. Talk to it the way you would talk to a person:
The cost per lead for Events looks wrong. There were only four leads. Recalculate excluding channels with fewer than ten leads and say in the summary that you did.
This is where most of the value is. People who get little out of Asteria Cloud tend to accept the first answer or start over from scratch. Neither works as well as one round of correction.
Take the deliverable
Ask for what you actually have to hand over:
Turn this into a one page summary I can send. Keep the chart.
The document opens in the Workshop beside your conversation, where you can edit it directly, ask for changes, and download it.
The mistakes everybody makes in week one
Starting a new chat for a follow-up. A new conversation does not inherit the last one's files or figures, only a summary of what it was about. If it is the same job, stay in the same conversation.
And the opposite: one conversation for everything. A conversation that runs for weeks costs more with every message, slows down, and eventually has its middle compacted into a summary, so early detail starts going missing. Aim for one conversation per task. See very long conversations.
Asking about documents that are not there. Asteria reads what you attached, what is in a collection you named by name, what it fetched from the web, and anything your organisation has connected (your mailbox, a shared drive, your calendar). It cannot read the file you meant to attach and did not, or a system nobody has connected yet. If a connector would help, it is worth asking your administrator: see Connections.
Uploading the same twenty documents into every chat. That is what a collection is for. Put them in once, name the collection in your message, and they are available in every conversation from then on.
Believing a number without checking it. Asteria shows its working and cites its sources precisely so you can check. For anything that goes in front of other people, open the source and confirm the number yourself.
Anything you would not put in an email to a colleague, think twice about putting in a chat. Your organisation's administrators can see usage, and depending on your organisation's settings, conversations may be reviewed. Ask your administrator what applies to you.
Next
- The message box covers attachments, models and the shortcuts that save real time.
- Collections is the step up from attaching files one at a time, and it is what makes this useful past week one.