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.

翻译：人们在使用数据时，常常需要跨多个应用程序移动数据，因为他们依赖这些应用互补的用户体验，以最佳方式完成各项任务。由于传统的复制-粘贴方法无法适应不同应用所采用的多样化表格表示形式，用户需投入大量精力重构数据格式和视觉呈现，这使得跨应用工作流程成本高昂。例如，当将包含条件格式的电子表格表格转移到标记文档时，用户需花费大量时间将其结构转化为适当的标签，并手动重新设置颜色格式。本文介绍了MagicCopy，一种基于AI的跨应用复制-粘贴技术，它利用源上下文和目标上下文以及用户以自然语言指定的指令，自动从一种应用中提取、解析、转换并（重新）格式化数据，以适配另一种应用。在一项包含十六名参与者的研究中，用户通过快速学习并应用MagicCopy，在三组工具对之间实现了数据跨应用移动。参与者还进一步探索了MagicCopy的多样化应用场景，以在其工作流程中支持更流畅的跨应用交互。