The average employee spends 57% of their work time using office software. This includes tools like Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and similar applications. With that much time being spent on these tools, most business owners could agree that streamlining manual tasks using Microsoft Copilot is worth including in their digital transformation strategy.
| “People spend so much time looking for ways to automate sophisticated IT tasks, such as cybersecurity scanning and cloud optimization. That makes it easy to overlook the mundane ways we use technology every day.” – Mario Arjona, Chief of Staff, Outsource Solutions Group |
With Microsoft 365 Copilot, you can expect to see a significant boost in your productivity. It not only automates mundane tasks but also provides insights and suggestions that can improve your work quality. It does this by analyzing how you work and tailoring suggestions based on usage patterns over time.
The article will show you exactly how this tool can accelerate your productivity. We’ll go over how it works and discuss ways in which you can use Copilot in various Microsoft 365 office apps.
What is Microsoft 365 Copilot?
Microsoft 365 Copilot is an AI-powered tool that integrates with Microsoft 365 apps such as Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. This integration allows you to streamline your tasks, generate content, analyze data, and create presentations more efficiently.
For example, you can ask Copilot to draft emails, summarize reports, or even suggest designs for your PowerPoint slides. Additionally, its ability to learn from your input and preferences over time ensures that the assistance it provides becomes increasingly personalized and effective.
How Does Microsoft Copilot For Microsoft 365 Work?
Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 works by leveraging advanced artificial intelligence to understand and execute tasks across Microsoft’s applications in real-time. Here’s what happens when you send it a request.
1. Understanding Your Request
Copilot uses natural language processing to interpret your instructions. This means it can understand a wide range of requests, from simple commands like “summarize this email” to complex queries such as “create a presentation on quarterly sales trends.”
For tasks that involve generating text, such as drafting emails or creating content, Copilot leverages variants of Open AI’s ChatGPT model. For understanding and processing the content within documents, emails, and spreadsheets, Copilot uses BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers).
2. Accessing Relevant Data
Once it understands your request, Copilot accesses the necessary Microsoft 365 applications and data. For example, if you ask for a summary of a document, it will analyze the content of that document directly within Microsoft Word.
3. Performing The Task
With the relevant data at hand, Copilot utilizes machine learning algorithms, such as those from ChatGPT, to perform the requested task. This might involve generating text, creating data visualizations, or suggesting edits.
4. Presenting Results
Finally, Copilot presents the results directly within the Microsoft 365 application you’re using. For example, if you asked it to write content, the content will appear directly on your Microsoft Word document.
| Interested in Learning About Microsoft Security Copilot? |
Benefits of Enabling Copilot in Your Microsoft Account
Workflow Productivity
By automating routine tasks such as data entry, email drafting, and content generation, Copilot significantly reduces the time and effort required to complete these activities. This automation allows you to get more done in fewer work hours.
Improved Efficiency
Copilot provides rapid insights by analyzing data and documents to extract relevant information. This capability ensures you spend less time searching for the information you need and more time using it to make informed decisions.
Personalized AI Assistance
Copilot learns from your usage patterns and preferences to provide personalized assistance that becomes more accurate and helpful over time. This reactive algorithm ensures that Copilot’s suggestions and actions align closely with your work style.
Enhanced Creativity
Copilot can generate creative content, suggest design ideas, and propose improvements to your documents and presentations. This support not only saves time but also inspires creativity, enabling you to produce high-quality work with less effort.
More Collaboration
By simplifying document sharing, co-authoring, and communication, Copilot enhances collaboration among team members. Its ability to summarize discussions and documents also helps ensure everyone stays on the same page.
How to Use Microsoft Copilot in Microsoft 365 Apps
How to Use Copilot in Word
Microsoft Word is one of the best places to use Microsoft 365 Copilot. There are a lot of things you can use the tool for in that application. Here are some examples.
| Automated Content Creation | Start by typing a prompt or a topic sentence in your document. Copilot can then generate a draft based on this input, fleshing out paragraphs, suggesting headings, and even creating lists that align with your initial direction. |
| Writing Assistance | Copilot provides real-time suggestions to improve your writing, such as grammar corrections, style enhancements, and vocabulary suggestions. |
| Summarization | For long documents or research material, Copilot can produce concise summaries. Just highlight the text you want summarized, and Copilot will provide a shorter version. |
| Research & Citation Help | Copilot assists with research by suggesting relevant information or data that could enhance your document. It can also help format citations, making it easier to credit sources correctly. |
| Language Translation | If you’re working in a multilingual environment, Copilot can translate sections of your document or the entire text into another language. |
How to Use PowerPoint Copilot
The average person takes approximately 20-60 hours to create a complete PowerPoint presentation manually. However, you can significantly reduce that time with Microsoft Copilot.
Simply type a rough outline of your presentation in PowerPoint. Copilot will suggest a comprehensive structure, complete with suggested sections and slide layouts. If you’re stuck on what to write, Copilot can generate slide content for you. Provide a topic or a question, and it will suggest detailed bullet points, text, and even relevant images.
For slides requiring data representation, Copilot can turn your raw data into visually appealing charts and graphs. Simply input your data, and Copilot suggests the most effective way to visualize it for your audience.
How to Use Copilot With Microsoft Excel
Using Microsoft 365 Copilot with Microsoft Excel enhances your data analysis and management capabilities, which makes it much easier to work with complex datasets.
Simply ask Copilot to analyze your data, and it will provide insights, trends, and patterns. For example, you can tell Copilot to “Find sales trends for the last quarter,” and it will analyze the data to highlight significant trends and even suggest a suitable chart to represent this information visually.
Copilot can also use your existing data to make predictions about future trends. By leveraging advanced AI models, it offers forecasts and what-if analysis, helping you make informed decisions based on your data.
How to Use Microsoft Copilot With Microsoft Teams
After a meeting, Copilot can automatically generate a concise summary, including key points discussed, decisions made, and action items. This feature ensures that everyone stays on the same page, even if they couldn’t attend the meeting.
Copilot can also help draft emails based on your notes or bullet points from a meeting. For instance, you can input a few key points into Teams, and Copilot will create a professional-looking email based on these key discussion points.
How to Use Microsoft Copilot With Microsoft Outlook
Beyond simply helping you draft emails, Microsoft Copilot can significantly improve how you manage emails and organize your schedule, making these tasks more efficient and less time-consuming.
In Outlook, Copilot can sort and prioritize your emails, helping you focus on the most important messages first. When planning meetings, Copilot can suggest times that work for all participants, based on the availability in their calendars. It can also draft and send meeting invites, streamlining the scheduling process.
Copilot can also remind you to follow up on emails that haven’t received a response. It can even draft follow-up emails for you, ensuring that important tasks and queries don’t fall through the cracks.
Get More Out of Your Microsoft 365 Subscription With Advice From IT Consultants
The Microsoft 365 business suite is one of the most widely used workplace tools. Yet, many employees still perform most tasks on its associated apps manually. 365 Copilot presents the perfect opportunity to bring business process automation to your daily office routine.
If you want to learn more about that, or other creative ways to use Microsoft 365, you can ask IT consultants from Outsource Solutions Group. Our team is highly adept with a wide range of technologies including the Microsoft suite and cloud servers.
Talk to us today to find out more about how we can help.
