Eight practical lessons on getting reliable, useful answers from AI chat tools (ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, Claude): clear instructions, examples, step-by-step reasoning, structured output, long documents, avoiding wrong answers and a reusable prompt library. Each lesson has a worksheet of prompts to try.

1. 1Prompt Engineering Lesson 1: How Chat AI Reads Your PromptWhat happens when you send a prompt: tokens, context windows, next-word prediction, why wording matters, why answers vary, and what the model…
2. 2Prompt Engineering Lesson 2: Clear Instructions — Role, Task, Context, FormatWrite prompts that work first time with the role-task-context-format pattern, constraints, audience and length, plus before/after examples for office tasks.
3. 3Prompt Engineering Lesson 3: Examples and Templates (Few-Shot)Show, don’t tell: give the model one to five examples to copy tone, structure or classification rules, and build reusable prompt templates…
4. 4Prompt Engineering Lesson 4: Step-by-Step Reasoning and CheckingGet better answers on calculations and decisions: ask for steps, break big tasks into stages, have the model check its own work,…
5. 5Prompt Engineering Lesson 5: Getting Structured Output — Tables and JSONAsk for answers you can use directly: markdown tables to paste into Excel, CSV, JSON with a fixed schema, and extracting fields…
6. 6Prompt Engineering Lesson 6: Long Documents and SummariesSummarise and question long documents: summary types, asking for quotes and page references, chunking very long files, comparing versions and meeting-minutes prompts.
7. 7Prompt Engineering Lesson 7: Avoiding Wrong Answers (Hallucinations)Why AI makes things up, which questions are risky, prompts that reduce it (give sources, allow “I don’t know”), and a verification…
8. 8Prompt Engineering Lesson 8: Build Your Own Prompt LibrarySave and reuse prompts that work: a simple library in OneNote, Excel or text files, templates with placeholders, custom instructions, Copilot prompt…

Related: prompt patterns that work, prompts for Excel and Office tasks.