Microsoft’s new AI-powered Paste is way cooler than it should be

PowerToys, the free suite of Microsoft user tools, has added a subtly powerful feature: Advanced Paste, which applies AI to a group of data that you’ve cut or copied, or wish to paste elsewhere.

It’s a weird but surprisingly cool concept, geared toward developers but with applications in a variety of different areas.

In 2023, we listed all of the various tools within PowerToys: from FancyZones to Image Resizer to a suite of Mouse Utilities, plus a lot more. Microsoft provides PowerToys as an installer, with the ability to download and run any of the apps you want.

Now you can add Advanced Paste to the list. “Its goal is to let you paste your clipboard content in any format you’d like, and can even custom format your content using AI,” Craig Lowen, a program manager for Microsoft, posted on Twitter/X.

The video demo does a great job describing the possibilities, but the idea is that you can use Advanced Paste to cut (CRTL+X) or copy (CTRL+C) some data, and then paste it.

The magic, however, arrives when you can actually describe how you want it formatted: Code as JSON or in Markdown; a list of addresses that can be alphabetized; data that can be arranged in a table with additional columns that AI can fill in. It’s a pretty neat tool and I’m eager to try it out for myself.