How to use ChatGPT to analyze PDFs

By Andrew Tarantola June 25, 2024

Thanks to its advanced vision capabilities, ChatGPT can provide you with in-depth analysis and summarization of images and documents alike. This can be especially handy when you have a research paper or legal documents spanning dozens of pdf pages. Why go through all that trouble to parse them yourself when you can simply have ChatGPT do it for you? In this guide, you'll see just how easy it is to upload PDFs to ChatGPT.

Difficulty

Easy

Duration

5 minutes

Upload a PDF to ChatGPT

Step 1: Log into ChatGPT. Open your web browser and navigate to ChatGPT.com and click the Sign In button in the lower-left corner. Enter your credentials as needed.

the chatgpt homescreen — Digital Trends

Step 2: Attach the PDF to the prompt window. Click the paperclip icon next to the text input field, select where you want the document sourced from — you can select from the local hard drive, Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive — and click the file you want to attach.

ChatGPT upload source — Digital Trends

Step 3: Enter your query. Once the PDF is attached, type your query, question, directions, or what have you into the prompt field. In this case, I'm asking the system how much more pork I'd need if I wanted to triple the serving size of the recipe. Click the upward-facing arrow button on the right edge of the prompt window to upload everything to ChatGPT's servers, and give the system time to do its analysis.

Chatgpt home screen with a PDF attached to the prompt field — Digital Trends

Topics

Andrew Tarantola

Computing Writer

Andrew has spent more than a decade reporting on emerging technologies ranging from robotics and machine learning to space…

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