AI Quick Tips 7: You Have So Many Ways To Format Your Output Besides Plain Text!

Most people don’t realize that they are not limited to “plain text” output from text-based AI tools like ChatGPT.

Plain text is what you are reading now.  It has characters like letters, numbers, punctuation, and also spaces.  It is unstructured and unformatted.

Sometimes that is all that you need. 

Please know that there are SO many other options.  Here are a few examples:

1. Ordered (or numbered) list
   1. Like this one
2. Unordered (or bulleted) list
3. Checklist
4. Table
5. Diagram
6. Graphs
   1. Line, pie, bar, etc.
7. Web links (URLS)
8. Emojis
   1. It tends to overdo it but you can always delete some of them

You can specify the output format that you want in your prompt.  You can add it conversationally like this:

“Please give me a bulleted list of 10 things to do while visiting Greece for 1 month.”

Or you can add it as part of a template:

“Persona: You are a travel agent
Task: Identify 10 things to do while on vacation
Context: Our family of four will be visiting Greece for 1 month over the summer.  We are two adults in our mid-40s and we have two children ages 15 and 12
Output format: bulleted list”

Try out some new output formats and start to unlock more possibilities