Description
In this episode, Ali and Liz discuss their personal updates before diving into the various functionalities of Microsoft Copilot across different applications like PowerPoint, Word, Excel, and OneNote. They explore the capabilities and limitations of Copilot, sharing their experiences and insights on how it can enhance productivity and streamline tasks. The conversation highlights the importance of understanding the different Copilots available and their specific use cases, as well as the challenges related to licensing and accessibility for small businesses and nonprofits.
Some resources to help you learn more about Copilot:
Copilot Mobile App
- What’s cool about this?
- It will generate images for you!
Copilot in your Web Browser
- What’s cool about this?
- Through businesses, you can get options to search the Web or search Work
- When searching Work, it will return data from your company’s own resources in addition to on the web
- Having it setup through your business also provides an added layer of security – what you’re searching isn’t used to train the large language model (LLM) unlike when you use the unprotected web version
- Update: in the episode we mention that only the app can create images. Good news! copilot.microsoft.com can now generate images for you too.
Copilot for M365 Add-On
- $30 per user per month
- Hard for small businesses and small non-profits (like TechFluent) to adopt because of cost
- No Trials Available for M365 Copilot, which could hinder companies’ abilities to adopt if no one can “try before they buy”
- An idea is to get a focus group for your organization to try it, track scenarios, and then share ideas with your organization
- Then see if the rest of the organization should adopt the technology
Blockers of Use
- People don’t know what it can do and don’t know what to do with it
- The best way to learn is to try it out
- If this resonates with you, check out the adoption kit from Microsoft: https://adoption.microsoft.com/en-us/copilot/
Copilot in Power Point
- Would love to be able to edit decks, but you can’t do that right now
- Will be helpful to help generate ideas on what your slide deck should include, but it seems like heavy editing is required
- Puts too many words on the slides (maybe try prompting for a limited number of words on the slide?)
- A best practice of making slide decks is to always have limited words! Use graphics!
- Our rating on a scale of 1-5:
- Liz: 1 mainly because it doesn’t help with formatting and that’s where you can spend a lot of time!
- Ali: 2 because it could be helpful for brainstorming and the limited editing capability is frustrating
- Use designer to help with slide layouts instead of Copilot
Copilot in Word
- Very helpful to get things under a certain word or character limit
- This can be helpful if you’re submitting an application or writing an essay that must remain under a certain word or character limit
- Write as you normally would, then have Copilot shorten it to be within the required length
- One limitation is that you can’t add pictures to documents – it gives suggestions on pictures you could add, but you have to go find them
- It also won’t identify if you have a picture within the document – it seems to only analyze the words
- Two places to use Copilot:
- Copilot pane on the right of the screen
- Drafting directly on your page (Alt + i)
- It does a decent job creating recipes for you
- Apple Pie
- Tater Tot Hotdish
- Our rating on a scale of 1-5
- Ali: 2 – harder to think of use cases for it in Word
- Liz: 1-2 – still early stages, not really impressed
Copilot in Teams
- Meeting recaps are great to show bullet points and a summary of the meeting
- Next steps and action items are helpful
- Shows you who spoke and for how long
- Help manage people with issues
- Project Managers can help identify who should or shouldn’t be on calls
- Doesn’t aggregate data over multiple meetings that are part of the same series
- You pick the occurrence of the meeting and it’ll show you stats
- Having aggregate data would help identify trends
- One of the more helpful Copilots currently available! We recommend you give this a try to recap meetings instead of watching meeting recordings.
Copilot in Outlook
- Could be helpful to write agendas or write concise emails
- Eliminates the need for someone to proofread your emails, out of office replies, etc.
- Have Copilot help to write in a specific tone – professional, light-hearted, etc.
- Watch out for AI-generated words like “delve” or “moreover”
- Can help you be more clear, concise, or articulate
- If you work in sales, this is where Copilot for Sales integrates closely with Outlook as well. Look into both tools and find the one that is best for you!
Copilot in Excel
- You have to have data in your Excel spreadsheet in order for Copilot to take action with it
- Can use it to do math, but you can also just do math in Excel so what’s the point?!
- It doesn’t seem to look at the data you have in the spreadsheet if you ask it a question about it
- We didn’t rate this Copilot very high but may have been limited by a lack of ideas on what to use it for!
Copilot in OneNote
- Why we’re excited about this Copilot:
- You can use it to summarize notes – particularly helpful for joining a project, for example
- If other people on your team have been taking tons of notes, use Copilot to summarize them so you don’t have to decipher everything they’ve written!
- If sales is using OneNote during the sales cycle, use Copilot to summarize before you onboard to a project
- You can prompt this Copilot to identify risks or potential issues and it will provide a summary! You can even ask it to help identify ways to mitigate these risks and it will give some suggestions
- This is the M365 Copilot we were most excited to use and have already begun to use since exploring it! Give it a try!
