How to use Copilot in Microsoft Teams, Word, Excel, and more

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From everyday prompt engineering to specialized functionalities across Teams, Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, Microsoft Copilot is designed to save you time. Integrated directly within Teams and the Microsoft 365 (M365) suite, Copilot accelerates processes and helps you get a head start on your tasks.

With practice and a little know-how, you can use Copilot to make quick work out of repetitive, time-consuming tasks and improve the way you collaborate, communicate, and present.

In this blog, SHI’s Microsoft experts will show you how to effectively use Copilot across Teams and M365. And at the end, you’ll see how we can help adopt Copilot across your entire organization with our M365 Copilot Enablement program.

Good results come from good prompts

No matter how you use Copilot, your results will only be as good as your prompts – the written commands that send Copilot to action.

For complex or creative requests, Copilot is more likely to provide your ideal results when your prompt includes four key aspects:

1. An explicit task to perform.
2. A specific persona to align with.
3. Context for why Copilot is performing the task.
4. A precise format for its results.

For simple requests, some aspects may not be necessary. For example, Copilot won’t need a persona to summarize your Outlook inbox, and you likely won’t need to format answers to basic questions.

As we explore how to use Copilot across Teams and M365, we’ll include sample prompts to help you get started. For further help mastering your prompts, consider taking SHI’s expert-led prompt engineering course.

Collaborate better in Teams

For knowledge workers, Microsoft Teams is the most popular application for using Copilot. Whether you’re returning from vacation to a bazillion notifications or need notes from an hour-long meeting, Copilot simultaneously simplifies and enhances collaboration within Teams.

In Teams, you can use Copilot to:

• Generate a bulleted recap of unread messages.
• Schedule meetings with the best mutual availability of all attendees.
• Provide meeting notes, recaps, action items, and even highlights of where attendees had differing opinions.

Sample prompts for Teams

To best leverage Copilot in Microsoft Teams, experiment with prompts like the following:

Recap messages: Provide a bulleted summary of all my messages from the past week, highlighting any action items or potential future meetings.

Schedule a meeting: Schedule a 30-minute meeting next Tuesday to discuss the department-wide Copilot rollout. Include myself, Jane Doe, and John Doe, and select a time with zero scheduling conflicts.

Give meeting notes: Provide notes for Tuesday’s Copilot meeting, highlighting any action items for myself, Jane, or John.

Craft the perfect response in Outlook

Whether failing to convey humor, misinterpreting and responding angrily to a casual message, or disrupting a thread by replying to a weeks-old email, no one wants to be that person in Outlook.

Copilot puts an end to botched emails, helping you manage your inbox, craft the perfect response, and stay organized and in the know. In Outlook, use Copilot to:

• Draft emails with professional grammar and your intended tone.
• Recap your inbox after a long absence.
• Summarize long email threads.

And because Copilot is integrated within your existing M365 tenant, it can pull from your contacts, SharePoint files, and groups to write and manage emails with depth and precision.

Remember: while Copilot is great for creating the first draft of an email, it’s not a replacement for human thought. Determine whether Copilot’s draft matches your intended messaging and adjust before you send.

Sample prompts for Outlook

If you want to take the legwork out of managing your Outlook inbox, prompts like these can be great starting points:

Craft an email: Write an email to Jane Doe with the subject line, “The AI webinar you won’t want to miss.” Jane is an IT professional in the pharmaceutical industry, and through this email, we want her to register for our upcoming webinar titled “How to use AI like a pro.” Use a friendly, casual tone and include a bulleted list of ways AI benefits her role within her industry.

Recap your inbox: Catch me up on all my emails from the past week. Highlight any emails from my management, action items from my team, and emails from my customers.

Summarize email threads: Summarize the email thread with Jane Doe about the AI webinar. Highlight any action items or potential future meetings.

Jumpstart your first draft in Word

The empty stare of a blank page in Microsoft Word can often be the biggest obstacle when writing statements of work (SoWs), reports, or documentation. With Copilot, creating your first draft can become the easiest part of your project.

Use Copilot in Word to:

• Draft SoWs, reports, documentation, blogs, and more.
• Summarize and answer queries about documents.
• Generate content according to your chosen persona and tone.

As you use Copilot in Word, it’s important to consider any content it generates as a first draft. Take time to edit the content, make it yours, and verify any factual statements. Generative AI can be a terrific way to end writer’s block or start your projects, but you should never submit its content as a final product.

Sample prompts for Word

Don’t let blank pages and novel-length documents drag you down. Get a head start on your projects with prompts like these:

Draft a report: Write a report about our AI webinar leveraging information from the email thread “AI webinar retrospective.” Write it from the perspective of an IT Systems Admin in an informative and concise tone. Include analyses of our data usage, adoption rate, and helpdesk SLAs.

Summarize a document: Summarize this document with bulleted lists categorized by headers that match those found in this document.

Answer questions about a document: What is the most expensive line item in this statement of work and to which service is it aligned?

Generate entire presentations in PowerPoint

When you’ve spent days or weeks compiling information for a project, the last thing on your mind is what it all should look like when you’re presenting it. You know exactly what you need to say – and with Copilot, you don’t need to think about how it all comes together on a slide deck.

In PowerPoint, Copilot enables you to:

• Draft a presentation with either a prompt or an outline from Word.
• Generate custom images for your slides.

Just like when using Copilot for Word, you should consider any slide Copilot creates in PowerPoint as a first draft. Review it, fact check it, and tinker with the visuals to align with your organization’s branding – and never move forward with an unedited presentation from Copilot as your final draft.

Sample prompts for PowerPoint

Use prompts like these to save time and brainpower when making your next presentation:

Create a first draft of a presentation: Create a 10-slide presentation about AI. I’m an IT professional presenting to a tech-savvy audience about data center sustainability and the amount of power and cooling AI demands.

Generate custom images: Generate an image of a data center server rack in the style of a surrealist painting. Add the image to Slide 4.

Refine spreadsheets in Excel

Excel is a keystone application for many knowledge workers. But as spreadsheets grow and data becomes more complex, it can be far too easy to get bogged down in the details.

Copilot enables Excel-savvy users to work at a rapid pace while helping novices dip their toes in the application’s more complex capabilities.

In Excel, Copilot can help you:

• Pinpoint specific information with XLOOKUP formulas.
• Create new columns with custom formulas.
• Provide deep data analysis with Python, without any user-written code.
• Summarize large swaths of data with PivotTables.

As you tinker with Copilot in Excel, it’s important to review formulas before applying them to your spreadsheet to ensure Copilot understood and correctly equated your prompt.

Luckily, Copilot in Excel provides formulas and the logic behind their generation before you apply them to your spreadsheet, making it easy to discard results that aren’t ideal.

Sample prompts

To get started with Copilot in Excel, try using prompts like the following:

Create a PivotTable: Make a PivotTable from columns A1:F23 in Helpdesk Sheet and show the average duration of each team’s support tickets.

Apply an XLookup formula: Add a column that looks up the number of resolved tickets for each team in the Helpdesk Sheet.

Analyze data with Python: Select the “Advanced analysis” button in the Copilot flyout menu, then select “Start advanced analysis.” Wait for Copilot to understand your data, then try telling it, Forecast monthly helpdesk ticket SLAs for the next three years.

Successfully adopt Microsoft Copilot with SHI

Microsoft built Copilot to save you time across your entire Teams and M365 workflow – including in Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. But without strong governance and thorough adoption, your organization risks entering the AI future with insecure data and an uninformed userbase.

With SHI’s M365 Copilot Enablement program, our Microsoft experts will help drive successful, widespread Copilot usage while preventing unintended access to the data Copilot creates.

During our M365 Copilot Enablement program, we’ll work with your teams to:

• Gather requirements, plan for AI integrations, identify goals and outcomes, and activate Copilot.
• Train users on prompt engineering and using Copilot for M365.
• Conduct a comprehensive analysis of data usage and health status within M365 and prepare your data and people for the use of AI.
• Evaluate AI priority personas, roll out Copilot to test groups, and establish early adoption frameworks and education.
• Implement production persona scenarios for AI, deploy Copilot to your organization, and provide a clear path to solidify tool adoption.

Learn more about our M365 Copilot Enablement program or contact us to adopt Copilot like a pro!