MagicCopy: Bring my data along with me beyond boundaries of apps
This addresses the costly cross-app workflows for users who move data between applications, though it is incremental as it builds on existing copy-and-paste concepts with AI enhancements.
The paper tackles the problem of inefficient data transfer between applications with different table representations, introducing MagicCopy, an AI-powered tool that automates extraction, transformation, and formatting based on natural language instructions, which users quickly learned to apply in a study with sixteen participants.
People working with data often move their data across multiple applications, because they rely on these apps' complementing user experiences to best complete their tasks. Since traditional copy-and-paste approaches do not accommodate diverse table representations adopted by different apps, users spend considerable effort to reconstruct data formats and visual representations, making cross-app workflows costly. For example, when transferring a spreadsheet table with conditional formatting to a markup document, users spend substantial time translating its structure into appropriate tags and manually reformat color. This paper introduces MagicCopy, an AI-powered cross-app copy-and-paste, leveraging source and target contexts and user-specified instructions in natural language to automatically extract, parse, transform, and (re)format data from one app to another. In a study with sixteen participants, users quickly learned and applied MagicCopy to move data across three pairs of tools. Participants further explored diverse applications of MagicCopy to support more streamlined crossed-application interaction in their workflows.