Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
cross-app data transfer
data format reconstruction
conditional formatting
table representation
workflow interoperability
MagicCopy: Bring my data along with me beyond boundaries of apps
🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the inefficiency of conventional copy-paste operations for transferring tabular data across applications, which stems from mismatches in formatting and semantics. The paper proposes MagicCopy, an AI-driven intelligent copy-paste approach that, for the first time, integrates contextual information from both source and target applications with user-provided natural language instructions to enable semantic-level data extraction, parsing, and reformatting. By leveraging context-aware modeling, natural language understanding, and structured data generation, MagicCopy supports end-to-end cross-application data transformation. A user study with 16 participants demonstrated that users rapidly learned to apply MagicCopy successfully across diverse application pairs, significantly improving workflow efficiency and spontaneously extending its use to a variety of novel scenarios.
📝 Abstract
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.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
AI-powered copy-paste
cross-application data transfer
natural language instructions
data format transformation
context-aware automation
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