Hello and welcome to Working with Microsoft 365 Copilot in Outlook

My name is Lee Mucciarone, and I am a Microsoft 365 content creator for Cloud Academy.

I have 4 years of IT experience working for Microsoft, with 2 years of specialized experience as a customer training specialist training users on Microsoft tools.

Today we are looking at Microsoft’s new AI Assistant, Microsoft 365 Copilot

Specifically, I will be taking you through Microsoft Outlook and how Copilot can improve your workflow with its powerful generative capabilities.

So lets jump right into Outlook and see what were working with

Here we are in Microsoft Outlook

Th first thing you might notice that is different from the other Microsoft Apps is that initially there doesn’t appear to be a copilot icon on the ribbon.

But don’t worry because copilot functionality is littered all around outlook, primarily within the messaging tab which we cant currently see

So keeping that in mind lets write a new email.

Ill click on new, and then mail to start drafting.

You notice that once I open this new email my ribbon switches to the message tab and we can see copilot right here

I can click on it to be provided with two options being Draft with copilot, which is the generative functionality most are familiar with, and coaching by copilot, which is something we will cover a little later in the video.

To draft an email I can click on draft or actually come down into the email window and type a slash to be shown another menu where I can chose files or draft with copilot.

Regardless of which method you use to access copilot, you will be brough into the all too familiar prompt window we have seen across all of the other Microsoft apps.

Just like with any generative AI tool, we can simply write what we want it to do and copilot will do the rest.

Lets say that I want to create a proposal about some possible improvements for a project myself and a colleague are working on.

If we stick with the same theme we have kept with the other Microsoft Copilot lessons, we will use Project A.L. as the example

So I will just ask Copilot to “Create a proposal for Lee about some possible improvements to Project A.L”, and see what it comes up with

After a moment, Copilot provides us with a response based on our prompt.

We can then decide to keep it, discard it, or regenerate an entire new response

The response at this point looks pretty good however you might notice that Copilot came back with specifics that I didn’t include.

With the nature of the prompt I just created and how I worded it, copilot thought I wanted it to create improvement metrics which, reading it back now makes sense

This is where I say with any generative AI content it is incredibly important to read and validate that the content it created was correct because if not you might accidentally send something that isn’t current.

That being said, I wanted copilot to send a meeting proposal to Lee to go over improvement metrics about project A.L.

So lets discard this a rewrite our prompt.

“Create a teams meeting proposal for Lee, where we plan to to go over improvement metrics for Project A.L. offering any day next week after 1pm est”

Again copilot takes a moment and then returns with its response.

This already looks much better then before however it is a bit wordy, so lets quickly fix that

I can come overt to this box here where copilot asks me if I want to change anything, and ust tell it what I want it to change.

So I will ask it to “remove the section about ______________” and copilot will make those changes over a few moments.

With those changes the proposal looks much better, so I can keep this and then fill out the rest of the information.

But lets go back and start a new email because there are other option when drafting

If I open up the prompt window again you may notice that there are two lines down here in the bottom left corner.

These are settings for Copilot to follow which will adjust the kind of content it generates.

Clicking on it opens up a menu where you can adjust the tone of copilots response to one of 5 options being Direct, neutral, casual, formal, or poem oddly enough.

You can also adjust the length of its response

And while the length is pretty self explanatory, lets just quickly show you the difference be tween a few of the tones

Current, we are set to formal.

Lets use the same exact prompt we used earlier just as a control example

Taking a minute to read the response over you can see that it indeed sounds like a pretty formal email

But if we delete this and go back to the draft windows, Lets change the tone to casual and use the exact same prompt to see the difference

The response should have similar information but will be structured in a much more casual tone

And quickly reading the response it definitely sounds a bit more casual than the formal option

Before we move on I must admit I am a bit curious about that poem option, so lets go back and try it quickly

Using the same prompt we will just set it to poem and, while the response isn’t really a usable feature for business purposes, that poem is definitely better than anything I could have come up with

Now that we know how copilot works, lets quickly show how you can respond to an email with copilot, and then move into some other features.

If you click reply on an email you will be able to draft a response but youll notice that at the bottom you have an option to draft a response.

You can use any of the progenerated responses or customize your response with the custom option which opens up the draft window that functions the same as the draft feature we just covered.

But you might also notice, whenever I click on an email in my inbox that above the actual message I have this summarize with Copilot option.

This is one of the most helpful features because you can use this to summarize long email threads that may not have the most easily accessible information.

If I click on this email from Lee, I can see it’s a decently long chain with a bunch of excess information that really is not important which makes it difficult to find the information I am looking for

So instead of manually searching for the pertinent information, I can just have copilot do that for my by asking it to summarize the thread!

We can see here that the email is about a meeting to discuss Project A.L, we proposed a meeting on 4/24 at 2pm, that the meeting would also go over financial data, and that we rescheduled the meeting for this coming Tuesday at 2pm

And my favorite part of the summary is that it has a tagging feature where it directs you to the part of the email which the summary is referring to

Each of these numbers are tags and you can see when I click on this it brings me right to the part of the email where I can find that information

And you can do this with any email, although I find it is most helpful with larger email chains.

Now the last feature I want to show you in outlook is the coaching feature

This is a neat little feature that analyzes an email for clarity, sentiment, and tone to help you structure and organize your thoughts

Here, I have an example email I wrote about disappointment in the progress of Project A.L. and some actions we will be taking moving forward to fix the lack of progress.

It is purposefully worded a bit harsh, unorganized, and vague to see how Copilot responds and makes suggestions

So I can go up to the copilot option in our ribbon, and instead of draft with copilot, I will choose Coaching by Copilot

It will take a moment to analyze our email and then come back with suggestions ton how to make the email better broken down by Tone, Sentiment, and Clarity

We can see that Copilot thinks the email could be more positive and that it comes off as harsh along with examples of how we could word things in a more positive tone

The reader sentiment asks us to consider the recipients perspective on this email

This harkens back to the tone of the email being negative and might harm overall moral of the team

And arguably the most important part is that copilot thinks the email is vague and could benefit from more details which it definitely can seeming as how I left it purposefully vague to test out the feature

But now, that’s pretty Copilot within outlook

Currently outlook doesn’t have any copilot search functionality directly within outlook which is less than ideal however it is possible using Copilot Chat

So if we go into our Office portal, we can open up copilot chat.

This is the main prompt window to interact with copilot within out 365 environment

We will go over Copilot chat more in detail during our Teams lesson, but the one feature I want to call out here is that you can ask it about your emails specifically.

For example, if I wanted to find an email with that financial sample, I can ask copilot, “Find the email with the financial sample”

It will then come back with the name of the email, with a link directly to the email and if I click on the number it will give me a preview and a direct link to open the email which brings me right back into outlook.

But those are the basics of Copilot within Outlook

There is so much functionality that its impossible to cover it all so I highly suggests getting in there and messing around with it yourself to get a better idea of all of it’s capabilities.

For more information on copilot and it’s functionality within Word I have linked related documentation in the course material section below for you to review

Thank you very much and have a great day!

Working with Microsoft 365 Copilot in Outlook

Learning Objectives

Intended Audience

Prerequisites