Six Microsoft Copilot features worth knowing about.
If you have a Copilot licence, these six features save you the most time. Stay until the end for the step-by-step agent walkthrough.
Most of us already use ChatGPT or Gemini, and they work great for general tasks.
So why bother with Microsoft Copilot? One reason: it can read your inbox, your meetings, and your team's files (with your permissions), without you copy-pasting anything. Ask it "what did the client say about pricing last week?" and it answers from your real emails. That is the main reason.
This article walks through six features worth a closer look. Each one comes with the exact prompt to paste, a short video, and a clear next step. Try one today. The rest will follow.
1. Outlook: handle email faster
Open any long email thread. At the top, click Summary by Copilot. You get a three-sentence brief: who said what, what's been decided, what's still pending.
Then click Draft with Copilot and paste this:
Reply confirming we'll send the proposal by Friday. Polite, friendly, two paragraphs.
You get a clean draft. Edit, send. A common 20-minute reply now takes 2 minutes.
2. Teams: get instant meeting summaries
Open the Copilot panel inside any Teams meeting. After (or even during) the meeting, type:
Summarise the meeting so far. List decisions made and action items with owners.
You get exactly that. Anyone who couldn't attend catches up in 90 seconds. Action items don't fall through.
The best trick: turn Copilot on before a recurring meeting starts. The recap lands in chat the second the meeting ends.
3. Word: no more blank pages
In Word, Copilot can:
· Draft a document from a one-line description
· Rewrite a paragraph (shorter, friendlier, more formal)
· Summarise a long document into bullets
· Generate the structure for a report you have not started
The most underused prompt:
Summarise this document and turn the key points into a one-page brief for a non-technical audience.
Hand it a 30-page RFP, a vendor agreement, or a meeting deck. You get a usable brief in seconds.
4. Excel: ask questions about your data
This is the feature most people miss. Open any Excel file with data. Click the Copilot icon. Try one of these:
What patterns do you notice in this data?
Add a column flagging rows where the response time is more than 2x the median.
Show me a chart of tickets by category, sorted by month.
Copilot writes the formulas, builds the charts, and applies the conditional formatting. You don't need to know XLOOKUP or pivot tables.
5. BizChat: search all your apps at once
Open Microsoft 365 Chat (also called BizChat). Ask a question that spans your work:
What did Marcus say about the Acme migration in any meeting or email this month?
Summarise all my Teams DMs from yesterday into a single brief.
Find the latest version of the IT runbook and tell me what changed since last quarter.
Copilot searches your emails, chats, files, and meetings at once. It returns a single answer with sources. No copy-paste, no app-switching. This is the feature that genuinely has no public-AI equivalent.
6. Build your own agent (the most powerful feature)
If you only learn one thing from this article, learn this. A custom agent is like saving your favourite ChatGPT prompt forever, except it also knows your files. You build it once, and from then on you just talk to it.
Three agents anyone can build today:
Email Reply Helper. Drafts replies in your tone, trained on your last 50 sent emails.
Runbook Reader. Answers questions from your team's runbooks in numbered steps.
Weekly Update Generator. Writes Friday's status update from the week's meetings and chats.
Below is the exact step-by-step. Each step takes under a minute.
Open Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat
Go to m365.cloud.microsoft/chat or open the Copilot app in Teams. In the left sidebar, click Create an agent (or look for the "+" button next to "Agents").
Name your agent and describe what it does
A short, useful description teaches the agent how to behave. Be specific about tone and format.
Name: Email Reply Helper
Description: Drafts polite, two-paragraph email replies in my usual tone. Friendly but professional. No marketing language.
Add knowledge: tell the agent what files to read
Click Add knowledge or Sources. Pick a SharePoint folder, a Teams channel, an Outlook folder, or specific files. The agent will only answer from these.
Add a starter prompt (optional but powerful)
This guides every conversation, so you don't have to repeat instructions every time.
When I paste an email, draft a reply in two paragraphs. Friendly tone. End with a clear next step. Use British English.
Test the agent in chat
On the right side of the create-agent screen there is a test panel. Paste a sample email. Check the reply tone, length, and accuracy. Tweak the description in step 2 until it feels right.
Save and pin it
Click Create (or Save). Your agent appears in the left sidebar under Agents. Click the pin icon so it stays at the top. From now on, you (and anyone you share it with) just open it and chat. Briefing already done.
One last thing
The point isn't to use Copilot for everything. It's to find the two or three features that make your day noticeably easier, and use them three times a week until that becomes a habit.
Pick one feature from this list. Try it three times this week. Don't try all six at once.
The agent in feature 6 alone, built once, will save you an hour a week forever. Start there.
Which of these did you try first? What surprised you? Drop a comment below.