Executive reports and briefings

You have a pile of raw material — status updates, survey responses, quotes, performance numbers, half-finished notes — and a leadership meeting on the calendar. The job is to turn all of it into a short, sharp report that follows the format your executives already expect: the highlights, what’s at risk, what needs a decision.

This walkthrough shows you the end-to-end flow. You’ll set up a small library of your best past reports so Chat learns your house style, build the report inside a Folder, draft and refine it until the tone and depth match your exemplars, then share the finished piece with the people who need it. Once it’s set up, this becomes a repeatable 15-minute task instead of an afternoon of rewriting.

What you’ll need

A few of your best past executive reports to use as style references (PDF, Word, or text — anything you’d be happy to point to and say “make it look like this”).
Your raw inputs for this report: the survey responses, the quotes, the metrics, the status notes.
A couple of minutes to set up a Collection and a Folder the first time. After that, you’re straight into drafting.

The flow at a glance

Create an Executive Reporting Collection and upload your exemplar reports.
Create a Folder for the report you’re building.
Paste your raw inputs into the conversation.
Ask for a base executive summary.
Align format, depth, and tone with your exemplars.
Refine until it’s right.
Copy, export, or share the finished report.
Keep your exemplars current so every future report gets sharper.

Step 1 — Build your “Executive Reporting” Collection

A Knowledge Collection is a curated set of documents Chat can read and cite. Here you’ll use one to hold your style references — the reports whose structure, length, and voice you want every new report to echo.

Open Knowledge in the sidebar and create a new Collection. Name it something clear like Executive Reporting.
Upload your exemplar reports — drag them in, or use Add Source. Chat accepts PDF, DOC/DOCX, XLS/XLSX, PPT/PPTX, CSV, TXT, Markdown, and more, up to 100 MB per file. Each file is read, broken into sections, and indexed so Chat can search it.
Pick three to five strong examples. A monthly board update, a weekly leadership brief, a project status one-pager — variety helps Chat match the right shape to the right ask.

Share it with your team. If colleagues prepare reports to the same standard, grant them access so everyone draws from the same references. Open the Collection’s access settings and share it with specific people, a group, or your whole organization. From then on, anyone on your team produces reports in a consistent format.

Learn more in Upload a file to work with and Chat, Notes, Channels, and Knowledge.

Step 2 — Create a Folder for this report

A Folder is a workspace that keeps everything for one piece of work together — its conversations, its linked Knowledge, and its settings. Build each report inside its own Folder so your style references and your raw inputs stay in one place.

Create a new Folder — for example, Q2 Leadership Briefing.
Link your Executive Reporting Collection to the Folder so Chat can reference your exemplars while it drafts.
Start a new conversation inside the Folder. New chats you open while the Folder is active automatically belong to it, so you can come back later and pick up exactly where you left off.

See Find and organize your conversations for more on Folders, sharing, and keeping your sidebar tidy.

Step 3 — Paste in your raw inputs

Now bring in the material the report is actually about. You can paste text straight into the message box or attach files — whichever is faster for what you’ve got.

Paste verbatim survey responses, customer quotes, and short status notes directly into the conversation.
Attach spreadsheets of performance data, longer documents, or exported reports using the + menu or by dragging files in. Each attachment shows its status as it uploads and is ready to use a moment later.

Don’t worry about tidying it first — messy is fine. Chat’s job is to find the signal in it.

Step 4 — Ask for a base executive summary

With your inputs in front of it, ask Chat to produce a first draft. Be explicit about the sections you want — the structure carries most of the value in an exec report.

Example prompt

“Turn everything above into an executive summary for our leadership team. Use these sections: Headline (2–3 sentences), Key results, Risks and watch-items, Decisions needed, and Priorities for next period. Keep it concise and lead with what matters most.”

Chat reads your pasted inputs and attachments, pulls out the main themes, flags the risks and the open decisions, and returns a structured first draft. You’ll see it work through its steps — gathering information, building context, composing the response — and then the report appears, with citations back to your source material where it drew on specific numbers or quotes.

This first pass won’t be final, and that’s expected. You now have a solid base to shape.

For the fundamentals of getting a tight summary from raw material, see Summarize a document.

Step 5 — Align format, depth, and tone with your exemplars

Here’s the step that makes the output yours. Ask Chat to compare its draft against the reports in your Collection and bring it into line.

Example prompt

“Compare this draft to the example reports in the Executive Reporting collection. Match their structure, section order, level of detail, and tone of voice. Use the same kind of opening, the same heading style, and a similar length.”

Because your exemplars are linked to the Folder, Chat reads them and re-shapes the draft to fit — reordering sections, tightening or expanding detail to match the depth your leaders expect, and adjusting the voice. You can point at specifics, too:

“Open with a ‘Decisions needed’ box the way the March board update does, and keep each section to three bullets like the weekly briefs.”

Step 6 — Refine until it’s right

The draft is close. Now polish it with a single click instead of re-typing instructions. Below each response you’ll find quick action buttons:

Button	Use it when
Refine this	The report is on the right track but needs a final polish — tighter wording, smoother flow.
Explain more	A section is too thin and needs more substance or context.
Try different approach	The overall framing isn’t landing and you want a fresh take.

Or just say what you want in plain language: “Make the risks section blunter,” “Cut this to one page,” “Add a one-line recommendation under each decision.” Iterate as many times as you need — each turn keeps the structure you’ve built and only changes what you asked for.

More techniques for shaping written output: Draft emails and documents.

When the report reads the way you want it to, get it where it needs to go.

Copy the response straight into an email, a slide, or a doc with the copy button on the message.
Export the conversation as PDF, Markdown, plain text, or JSON from the conversation menu — handy for attaching the report or filing it.
Save it to a Note so the final version lives as a clean, reusable “review pack” you can return to.
Share it with your team without leaving Chat: share the Folder’s conversation with the specific people who need it, or post the report into a Channel so the whole leadership group sees the same synthesis in one place.

Step-by-step download and copy options are in Export a conversation.

Step 8 — Keep your exemplars current

The quality of your reports compounds. Each time you produce a report you’re especially happy with, add it to your Executive Reporting Collection as a new exemplar. Retire any old examples that no longer reflect how you want to report.

Over a few cycles, your Collection becomes a precise picture of your house style — and every new report aligns to it faster, with less steering from you.

The outcome

A 15-minute path from a pile of raw updates to a leadership-ready report that looks like it came from your team — because it’s modeled on your team’s own best work. Less digging, less rewriting, and risks and decisions that jump off the page. Once your Collection and Folder are set up, the next briefing is mostly Steps 3 through 7.

Upload a file to work with — attach documents and build Knowledge Collections.
Summarize a document — get a tight summary from long or messy material.
Draft emails and documents — write and refine with the response actions.
Find and organize your conversations — Folders, sharing, and keeping work together.