A complete guide to using Microsoft Copilot across every Microsoft 365 application — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, and Loop. Real workflows, specific prompts for each application, advanced features, and enterprise deployment considerations. Three reading levels. Official sources only.
Stuck at any point? Ask an AI about this page →If your organisation uses Microsoft 365, Copilot is available inside every major application. Here is a plain-English guide to what it does in each one.
Copilot can draft entire documents from a brief, rewrite sections, summarise long documents, and generate tables from text descriptions. The most useful feature: paste in rough notes and ask Copilot to turn them into a polished document.
Copilot in Excel understands your data and can analyse it, create charts, write formulas, and explain what patterns mean — in plain English. No formula knowledge required.
Describe your presentation and Copilot builds it — slides, content, structure, and speaker notes. Start from a Word document and Copilot creates a full slide deck. Or ask it to improve existing slides.
Copilot in Outlook summarises email threads, drafts replies, and helps you clear your inbox faster. The thread summary is the killer feature — a week’s worth of back-and-forth in 3 sentences.
Copilot in Teams joins your meetings and generates summaries, action items, and decisions in real time. The catch-up feature lets you ask “what did I miss?” for any channel or conversation you have not read.
Copilot in OneNote can summarise note sections, generate study guides from lecture notes, and create plans from brainstorms. Ideal for students and anyone who takes extensive notes.
The true power of Microsoft 365 Copilot is what happens when you combine apps. Example: your meeting notes are in Teams. Copilot summarises the meeting. You ask Copilot in Word to draft a follow-up proposal based on the meeting summary. You ask Copilot in PowerPoint to turn that proposal into a deck. You ask Copilot in Outlook to draft an email attaching the deck. One meeting, four deliverables, created by AI from the original discussion. This is the “a new day in productivity” moment Satya Nadella was describing.
Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence ($30/user/month, on top of an existing Microsoft 365 subscription). This is the enterprise-grade version with full access across all apps.
The free Copilot at copilot.microsoft.com and in Edge/Windows does not include the deep M365 integration — it cannot see your emails, documents, or Teams meetings.
Source: microsoft.com/microsoft-365/copilot — April 2026
Always provide context about your organisation, your role, and your audience. Copilot has access to your M365 data — but the more you tell it in the prompt itself, the more targeted the output. A vague prompt gets a generic result; a specific prompt leveraging your actual context gets something genuinely useful.
Deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot at enterprise scale involves several layers of technical and organisational readiness that go beyond simply purchasing licences.
Copilot accesses user data through the Microsoft Graph — the unified API layer for M365 data. Critically, Copilot respects the existing permission model: if a user cannot access a document in SharePoint, Copilot cannot access it on their behalf either. This is sometimes called “oversharing risk” — if permissions in SharePoint are too permissive, Copilot may surface documents to users who technically have access but were never expected to see them. Permission audits are a key deployment consideration.
Microsoft (2024). “Microsoft 365 Copilot architecture and how it works.” Microsoft Learn. learn.microsoft.com — Copilot Architecture
The Semantic Index is Microsoft’s vector search infrastructure built over an organisation’s M365 content. It creates semantic embeddings of SharePoint documents, emails, Teams messages, and OneDrive files — enabling Copilot to find relevant content by meaning rather than keyword. The index is maintained per-user and per-organisation, with access scoped by the Microsoft Graph permissions model.
The Semantic Index is automatically built and maintained by Microsoft — administrators do not need to configure it. However, the quality and completeness of the index depends on content being in SharePoint/OneDrive/Teams rather than local file systems or external storage.
Microsoft 365 Copilot processes data within the same data residency boundaries as the customer’s M365 tenant — EU customers’ data stays in EU data centres, consistent with GDPR requirements. Copilot interactions are logged in the M365 compliance centre and are subject to the same e-discovery, retention, and audit policies as other M365 communications.
Customer data processed through M365 Copilot is not used to train OpenAI’s foundation models, per Microsoft’s data protection commitments.
For organisations needing domain-specific AI, Copilot Studio (formerly Power Virtual Agents) enables building custom Copilot agents grounded in organisation-specific knowledge. Agents connect to SharePoint knowledge bases, external APIs, databases, and other data sources via Power Platform connectors. They can be deployed in Teams, SharePoint portals, or external websites. The agents use RAG to ground responses in the configured knowledge sources, with fallback to general Copilot capability for queries outside the knowledge base.
Microsoft (2024). “Data, Privacy, and Security for Microsoft 365 Copilot.” learn.microsoft.com — Copilot Privacy
Microsoft (2024). “Microsoft Copilot Studio documentation.” learn.microsoft.com — Copilot Studio
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