How to use Copilot in Microsoft 365: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams

Which Copilot you actually have

The word Copilot is on a dozen Microsoft products. Three matter here.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is the chat assistant included with a Microsoft 365 work or school account. It answers from the web and from whatever you paste or upload, with enterprise data protection: your prompts are not used to train models and are handled under your organization's Microsoft 365 terms. Without the paid license, it does not reach into your mailbox or files.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is the paid add-on license. It turns on Copilot inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, and Loop, and it switches Copilot Chat into work mode: grounded in your email, calendar, files, chats, and meetings through Microsoft Graph, with the permissions you already have enforced.

Consumer Copilot (the Windows app or the Copilot website with a personal account) is a separate product with consumer data terms. Do not use it for work data.

To check which you have, open Copilot Chat from the Microsoft 365 app or Teams. If you see a Work and Web toggle and Work returns answers from your own files, you are licensed. If your Word ribbon has a Copilot button that opens and drafts, same answer.

Licensing and admin basics, in words

Microsoft 365 Copilot is sold as a per-user, per-month add-on on top of a qualifying Microsoft 365 or Office 365 business or enterprise subscription. The headline list price has been stable for years (thirty US dollars per user per month, as of mid-2026; pricing changes often), and Microsoft has added lower-priced bundles aimed at smaller businesses, so check the current licensing page or ask your reseller.

Your admin assigns licenses in the Microsoft 365 admin center, decides whether web grounding is on, controls which agents and connectors are available, and can apply Purview sensitivity labels and data loss prevention policies that Copilot respects. Audit logs record Copilot interactions for compliance.

Two admin facts shape your experience as a user:

• Copilot inherits permissions. It shows you only what you could already open. That also means it will surface a spreadsheet someone over-shared three years ago. Good IT teams review SharePoint permissions before rollout.
• Files must be in OneDrive or SharePoint. Copilot cannot reference a document that lives only on your desktop. If Copilot cannot find a file, that is the first thing to check, followed by whether you have access and whether it was saved recently enough to be indexed.

For regulated roles, the Microsoft 365 boundary is usually what compliance approved, but confirm which content types (PHI, privileged material, PII, regulated financial data) are allowed in prompts under your policy. And never paste confidential data into a consumer AI tool unless your organization has approved it.

Copilot Chat with work grounding

This is the feature to learn first. In the Microsoft 365 app, Teams, or Outlook, open Copilot and set it to Work. Now you can ask across everything you have access to:

• "What did [PERSON] ask me for in the last two weeks that I have not replied to?"
• "Summarize the last three status decks for the Northwind project and list what changed."
• "Prepare me for my 2 p.m. with [CUSTOMER]: recent emails, open items, and the last meeting recap."
• "Find the file where we agreed on the Q3 pricing, and quote the paragraph."

Type a forward slash to reference a specific file, person, or meeting; that narrows the search and improves accuracy. Every answer comes with citations. Click them. Copilot's most common failure is a plausible summary drawn from the wrong version of a document.

Copilot Pages pulls an answer into a shared, editable page, and Copilot Notebooks gathers a set of files and chats into one working space for a project. Both become useful once you have a Copilot Chat habit.

Copilot in Word

Start a blank document and use the Copilot icon to draft from a prompt, referencing existing files with the slash: "Draft a one-page project charter for [PROJECT] based on /Kickoff notes.docx and /Budget.xlsx. Sections: goal, scope, timeline, owners, risks."

Highlight text and choose Rewrite for tone or length variations, or ask in the side pane: "Turn this section into a table," "What questions would a skeptical reader ask about this document?" or "Summarize this forty-page policy in ten bullets with page references."

Where it disappoints: long documents with complex formatting can come back flattened, and it is better at a first draft than at editing in your voice. Draft with Copilot, then edit yourself.

Copilot in Excel

Copilot in Excel wants a clean table: one header row, no merged cells, no blank rows, consistent types in each column. Select the data (or convert it to a table with Ctrl+T), open Copilot, and ask:

• "Add a column that flags invoices more than 30 days past due."
• "Show total sales by region as a chart."
• "Which customers had the largest drop from Q2 to Q3?"
• "Highlight rows where margin is below ten percent."

Copilot shows the formula before applying it, which is the moment to check it. Advanced analysis runs Python inside Excel for forecasting and larger transformations; ask for it when the question involves statistics or many steps. Some builds also include a COPILOT function that calls the assistant from a cell formula; check your version.

Limits: it works on the table you point it at, not across a dozen sheets at once, and very large or messy sheets slow it down or stump it. Check every total against a manual SUM the first few times.

Copilot in PowerPoint

The best input to PowerPoint Copilot is a Word document. Write the narrative in Word with headings, then in PowerPoint: "Create a presentation from /Q3 business review.docx using our company template." Headings become slides, and your template's fonts and colors are kept.

From there: "Add a slide summarizing the risks," "Make this deck more concise," "Rewrite the speaker notes in a conversational tone," or "Summarize this deck in five bullets" when someone sends you sixty slides before a meeting.

Expect to fix layouts. Copilot's slide design is competent and generic; the words are the value.

Copilot in Outlook

Two features earn a daily place. Summarize, at the top of a long thread, produces a short recap of who said what. Draft with Copilot writes a reply from a few words of instruction ("decline politely, propose next Tuesday, ask for the revised scope"). Coaching by Copilot reviews a draft you wrote for tone and clarity before you send it.

Ask Copilot Chat in Outlook to "list emails from my manager this week that need a reply" or "draft a summary of my week for my team from my sent items." Verify recipients and any commitments before sending; Copilot drafts eagerly.

Copilot in Teams: the meeting recap

This is the feature most people would pay for on its own. When a meeting is transcribed (turn on transcription or recording, or use the admin-enabled option that lets Copilot work without saving a transcript), you can ask Copilot during the meeting "What did I miss?" or "What questions are still open?" Afterward, the Recap tab shows AI notes, action items, and who said what, linked to the moment in the transcript.

In chats and channels, "Summarize this channel for the last week" or "What decisions were made in this thread?" replaces scrolling.

Rules: everyone in the meeting should know it is being transcribed, external participants need consent per your policy, and the recap is a draft. Read it before you forward it. Speaker attribution and action-item ownership are the two places it errs.

Agents and Copilot Studio, briefly

An agent is a Copilot with a job. Microsoft ships several: Researcher, for multi-step reports that combine web and internal sources; Analyst, for data work in the style of a data scientist; and a Facilitator that takes live notes in Teams meetings. A SharePoint site can have its own agent that answers only from that site's documents.

You can build your own. Agent builder inside Copilot Chat makes a simple agent from instructions and a set of files, with no code. Copilot Studio is the full low-code product for agents that connect to business systems, follow multi-step processes, and get published to Teams or a website; that is usually an IT or power-user project, and some agent usage is metered separately from the license. Start with a site agent or a simple instructions-plus-files agent for a job like "answer policy questions from the HR handbook," and involve IT before anything touches a live system.

A worked example: Monday morning in twenty minutes

You are an account manager with fourteen accounts, back from a week off. Open Copilot Chat in Teams, set it to Work, and paste:

You are my executive assistant. I have been out of office for the last seven days. Using my email, Teams chats, calendar, and meeting recaps from that period:

1. List every message from a customer or my manager that asks me for something and has no reply from me. For each: who, what they asked, when, and a one-line suggested reply.
2. List meetings I missed that have a recap, with the decisions and any action items assigned to me.
3. List anything on my calendar in the next three days that needs preparation, and name the file or thread I should read first.

Format: three sections, tables where possible, a citation on every item. If you are unsure whether an item needs a reply, include it and mark it uncertain rather than leaving it out.

Click through the citations for anything you will act on. Then in Outlook, use Draft with Copilot on the three most urgent replies, and in Word ask for a one-page week-ahead summary from the answer. Twenty minutes, and you know where you stand.

Limits and what to verify

• Stale or wrong-version answers. Copilot may cite an old draft. Check the file date in the citation.
• Permission surprises. If a colleague sees something in Copilot they should not, that is a SharePoint permission problem; report it.
• Confident math. Excel Copilot formulas can be subtly wrong. Test with a known row.
• Meeting attribution. Recaps mis-assign speakers and owners. Correct before sharing.
• Feature drift. Microsoft renames and moves features often; when a button is not where this guide says, search Help inside the app or check Microsoft's current documentation.

Next steps

• Compare Copilot with the alternatives in ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini vs Copilot and read the Microsoft Copilot tool page.
• Go deeper on spreadsheets in AI for Excel and spreadsheets and on meetings in the AI meeting notes guide.
• Learn the vocabulary: copilot, grounding, and AI agent.
• Writing the rules for your team? Start with How to write a team AI policy.
• Try prompts from meetings and summaries, build your own with the prompt builder, or take the course.