Using Copilot in Microsoft 365 applications - Microsoft Copilot Tutorial

- The optional add-ons for Copilot that you can pay for come with the ability to use Copilot AI tools inside of Microsoft 365 applications. Users with a personal or family account can subscribe to Copilot Pro. They will have Copilot features in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook. Business users can take advantage of these features with a Copilot for Microsoft 365 license. Business users can use Copilot in those same applications as well as in Microsoft Teams, and there are a few additional features there for business users that individuals do not have, but the general way these tools work is pretty much the same. To see this, I'll open Microsoft Word. In Windows, you can open the menu for account settings near the top right or on a Mac that's near the top left. And here I can confirm that I am signed in, and this account does have the Copilot for Microsoft 365 license. Great, so let's start a new document. I'll just use the template for a blank document, and when I start a new document, I see this Copilot panel. So, one way to use this is to ask it to write a draft of text based on a specific prompt. Remember, the more detail you put into your prompt, the better the result will be, but I'll just try something simple here. I'll ask it to draft a document comparing different forms of renewable energy, then click Generate, and I will need to give this some time. I can see the text it wrote here in my document. And in this panel at the bottom, I can choose to keep it, delete it, or I could type in a follow-up prompt asking for changes. I'll just choose to keep it in my document. Now, at the end of this new text, I'll hit the Return key to start a new paragraph. And when you have a new blank line or a blank page, you will see this Copilot button on the left, which will open that Copilot panel. Or, if you select an existing piece of text, that button will appear next to what you have selected, and in that case, it gives you an option to ask Copilot to rewrite that selected text. So, those are some Copilot features in Microsoft Word, specifically. Outlook has similar features for writing drafts of email messages. But other office applications work differently, so they have other features. But you can also open the Copilot chat assistant inside many of these applications. First, make sure the Home ribbon is selected at the top, then look for the Copilot button. When I click that, it opens a panel where I can use the Copilot chat assistant to ask questions or have conversations. Or, you can make requests specific to this application or the document that you have open. I'll just ask it to summarize the document, and it gives me that summary here in the chat panel. And of course, I could ask detailed questions about the document as well. Now, my goal here is not to show you how to work with Copilot in Word specifically. We have other courses on Copilot in Word and in the other Microsoft applications. The point is that this can do much more than the standard chat assistant. So look for that Copilot button in the different office applications, or take a look at our other training courses for more.