Hello and welcome to working with Microsoft 365 Copilot in Word. My name is Lee Mucciarone and I'm a Microsoft 365 content creator for Cloud Academy. I have four years of IT experience working for Microsoft with two years of specialized experience as a customer training specialist training users on Microsoft tools.

Today we're looking at Microsoft's new AI assistant, Microsoft 365 Copilot. Specifically, I'll be taking you through Microsoft Word and how Copilot can improve your workflow with its powerful generative capabilities.

Before we jump into it, it's important to note that Microsoft 365 Copilot requires its own stand-alone license, which can be purchased and assigned through your Microsoft 365 admin portal. Assuming you have that license, we can jump right on into Word.

Now we can access Copilot in two different locations. Over here on the left-hand side of our cursor and up on the top-right of our screen in the ribbon. Both of these locations offer similar functionality but have minor differences, which we will cover in a moment.

For now, we'll just click on the Copilot icon within the document. And just like you would expect from a generative AI tool, we have our prompt window. This is where we can tell Copilot exactly what we want it to do. For example, if I wanted Copilot to write me 10 best tips for starting my own business, I can just type that out and then click on “Generate”.

Once it has generated its content, it will then have a similar box where we have options to adjust the content that it's generated. We can decide to keep the content as it is by clicking the “Keep It” button, regenerate the content using this “Regenerate” button, or trash the entire thing by clicking on the trash icon.

The last box here is a cool little feature that allows us to refine the content that was generated. We can see the example here being “Make it more formal”, so let's just try that out and see how it works.

Again, it will take a moment, but after it's completed, you can see that it's adjusted some of its verbiage to fit the adjusted refinement prompt. Now obviously this might not necessarily be the best example for changing formal language, but it at least gives you an idea of the functionality within Copilot.

But if we open up the Copilot prompt window again, you'll notice we also have two additional buttons alongside the window, one for referencing a file and another labeled “Inspire me”. These are two of the more unique features within Copilot in Word. The “Inspire me” button only appears once you have some content within your document.

Since we have some information here, Copilot has content with which it can use to generate more content. The “Inspire me” button is meant to generate an idea based on the context found within the document. So, if I click on “Inspire me”, Copilot will use the new information that we created earlier and generate more content for us based on the context of that information.

The other button is the reference button which allows us to instruct Copilot to reference up to three documents when generating content based on our prompt. Clicking on it should auto populate some recent files. But if I wanted to reference a specific file, all I need to do is type the name of the document and it should auto populate within the window.

So, if I wanted to write a brief history about my fake company, I could reference my company document which holds information within it, and ask Copilot to write a brief history using that document.

So first, I'll delete all of the information we just created, open up Copilot again, write out my prompt, choose my reference document, and then click “Generate”. And just like before, Copilot will take a few moments to generate a new response based on our prompt and the information within the reference document.

As it generates content, you can see it even formats it in a nice easy-to-read style. And once it's done, we can see our brief history with a bunch of different information. If I wasn't completely happy with a part of what was generated, I can highlight a specific section of the document and click on the Copilot button to either rewrite the highlighted section or visualize that section's information into a table.

Currently, I like how this is written, but I think the awards section might be better visualized in a table format. So, let's see what Copilot comes up with. I can highlight the awards section, click on the Copilot button, and then visualize as table.

It'll take a moment, but after it's done, we'll have a new table with that information, which seems like a much easier way to read it. So, I can just delete the old information, and we're left with our newly formatted brief history of the Lemuccia company.

But that's only really half the functionality. We still have this Copilot button up in our ribbon, so let's go check that out now. If I click on it, the Copilot window opens up and starts off immediately with suggestions on how it can help and its functionality.

This is the Copilot Chat window where you can interact with it more naturally, similar to other generative AI tools. If I come down to the prompt box, we can see a couple of suggestions based on the information in the document. I can click on one of them or just write a new prompt and Copilot will provide me with all the information all within this Copilot window.

For example, if I wanted a quick summary of this entire document, I can ask Copilot to summarize the document. It will then take a moment and pull together a quick bullet point list summarization for me to quickly read through.

A really nice feature is that it also uses references, as you can see here depicted by the numbers and the references drop down menu at the bottom of its response. I can click on any of these and be brought directly to the section within the document which it is referring to.

But let's scrap this document for now and open up a fresh one to see how Copilot can influence our business workflow. Let's say I was planning a meeting for my team about progress on our yearly goals. I can just write out, “create an outline for a meeting about progress on our yearly goals” and it will generate an outline within Copilot window which I can then copy and add directly into our document.

This is just a single example of what it can do, but for a better idea of what Copilot is capable of, we can click on this “View prompts” button here and get a list of prompts we can use to create, understand, or ask and go further with “View more prompts” to see a massive list of potential prompts we could use.

We have prompts like write an introduction, outline a business plan, write more confidently, and so many more options which we can even favorite to use at a later time, or filter using categories based on the type of content we're working with.

But perhaps my favorite feature in Copilot in Word is its ability to access your organizational data for context. You'll notice that the prompt window has a black bar above it telling me that it is using this document.

This is effectively the default when you open the Copilot Chat window so that it can utilize the document for context when you're drafting with Copilot. I can actually click on this and change it to your organizational data, and Copilot will then be using the context within your organization's data when generating its responses.

Let's pretend we have already scheduled and had a meeting regarding our yearly goals like we were talking about in our earlier example. I can click “Change topic” just to refresh Copilot and then ask it about “what was my last meeting?”.

It will take a moment and then come back with information from my last meeting, which happened to be yesterday, talking about our yearly goals, and even see the linked reference information for our Copilot pulled this information from.

Copilot uses the information within the meeting, such as the transcript, chat and documents within it as context when generating its response to our new prompt.

We'll get more into this functionality once we get into Copilot and Teams, but as you can see, we even have access to the meeting directly through Copilot by following the reference link. But that's pretty much Copilot within Word.

There's so much functionality that it's impossible to cover it all, so I highly suggest getting in there and messing around with it yourself to get a better idea of all of its capabilities. Thank you very much and have a great day.

Working with Microsoft 365 Copilot in Word

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