AI was designed to help us get work done faster. Taking the responsibility of the mundane tasks that take up hours and hours of your day.
When these AI tools are integrated into everyday softwares like Microsoft 365, your work life becomes much easier.
Microsoft Copilot has done exactly that.
This blog is a full Microsoft Copilot guide covering what it is, what you can use it for, and how your experience with the software varies depending on which version you use.
A breakdown of Microsoft Copilot
Simply put, Microsoft Copilot is an AI assistant designed to make your life easier and help you get your work done faster.
It’s a chatbot that helps you generate, summarise, and automate everyday tasks. So, what specifically does it help you with?
What does Microsoft Copilot do?
Microsoft Copilot helps you generate first drafts for emails, reports, social posts, and more. Anything you need, Copilot gives you a start when you’re struggling.
It summarises long documents and email threads, so that you don’t have to spend your time digesting pages and pages. Not just that, but it helps you analyse information to find and highlight keypoints.
Because Copilot can work within Microsoft 365, tables and spreadsheets inside Excel that might be challenging to get your head around can be analysed and summarised by Copilot to find what you’re after.
Read more: Optimise security with our guide to Microsoft 365 policy management
Where can you use Microsoft Copilot?
A big part of understanding Copilot is what it can help you with, but where. Copilot itself comes with its very own app that you can use to ask questions or brainstorm. The app comes pre-installed on most new Windows 11 PCs.
The beauty of it is that it pretty much helps you with anything Microsoft-related. Including:
Microsoft Copilot within Microsoft 365
Copilot for Microsoft 365 is where the AI can take full advantage, as it’s integrated with Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.
Copilot for Microsoft PowerPoint
In PowerPoint, Copilot is designed to make your life as easy as possible when designing a presentation. It can draft a presentation from a simple prompt and align it with your PowerPoint objective, using the right tone and language for your audience.
Not just that, but it can create presentations from Word documents alone by turning them into slides, tightening titles and text to keep them informative and relevant, and condensing them into a fully fledged PowerPoint presentation.
Copilot for Microsoft Word
We’ve all stared at an empty Microsoft Word doc, knowing what you need to write, but struggling with how.
Copilot helps you write the first draft of your document, with a prompt as loose or as tight as you give it. With sections that you feel need tweaking but aren’t sure how, you can highlight the section to ask Copilot to rewrite it in the tone you require.
Copilot for Microsoft Excel
For most, the biggest help is with Excel Spreadsheets. Copilot can help you analyse data much more easily, by spotting trends in the spreadsheet you may not have noticed. It can summarise the spreadsheet in a clear format, making it easy to read.
A final thought
Taking full advantage of Microsoft Copilot’s features can make your work life much easier than it used to be.
With solutions for complicated data on spreadsheets you might not be able to understand, writer’s block when you’re trying to create a document, or that designers touch when you want to turn simple bullet points into a fully fledged presentation, Microsoft Copilot is the ultimate game changer for Microsoft 365.
