COPILOT PRO FOR WORD
A handy companion that can do the basics, but it won’t turn you into a wordsmith
Copilot has three main uses in Word: creating a draft for either an entire document or for sections of it, based on a prompt of up to 2,000 characters; rewriting selected text according to a prompt; and answering questions about a document’s content, including summarizing it.
When you create a new document in Word, you’ll see how much Microsoft wants you to draft using Copilot—it’s the first thing you see. Any time you make a new paragraph, the Copilot icon shows up in the left margin, letting you input a prompt to write a new section. If you select text, the icon shows an option to rewrite the selection. There’s also a Copilot icon in the Home toolbar, which opens a sidebar so you can ask questions about the open document, summarize it, or write additional parts.
The output quality of any big language model depends on the prompt you provide. If you aren’t specific or clear enough, Copilot Pro will produce dull texts that don’t match your voice. You must give sufficient details and context for it to understand your purpose and style, as well as information about the preferences of the audience, all of which can be tricky in a prompt limited to 2,000 characters.
Occasionally, it’s vague, drifts off-topic, or entirely ignores explicit instructions—for example, about word counts or facts you have told it to include. You must check and edit the texts that Copilot Pro writes to make sure they’re right for your goal and audience.
Copilot has its own little linguistic ticks, which you will probably need to be explicit about in prompts. It adores bullet-pointed lists, and will include them every time unless you tell it not to. Similarly, and likely reflecting the web content on which it’s trained, it loves to include ‘hints and tips’ sections.
Rewriting is also erratic. Although its grammar is impeccable (with a penchant for Oxford commas), Copilot won’t catch and fix all the problems in
your paragraphs; think coherence, structure, and flow. It’s no replacement for a dedicated tool such as Grammarly or LanguageTool. I even found that Copilot added in things that Microsoft Editor thought were errors.
Copilot can still be handy in Word if you use it for what it’s good at. For example, instead of making it write a whole document, ask it to create an outline for you to work. This delivers solid results, and if nothing else, avoids the blank sheet of paper issue.
I also found it handy to keep the sidebar open when working on a long piece; in one case, I needed to make sure that every chapter included a call to action at the end, and that’s something Copilot is great at. It’s also handy for those moments when you want to get suggestions for something, whether that’s as trivial as looking for an antonym or as complex as ‘give me five typical Russian male first names, popular in the 1950s’.
Considering this is Microsoft’s first stab at Copilot for Word, it’s an impressive effort.
when you realize that you’ve combined two people’s work and got different deadlines for a project. Stick to the preset prompts at first, and Copilot Pro in PowerPoint is a useful tool.– IAN BETTERIDGE
COPILOT PRO FOR EXCEL
The surprise hit of the package, Copilot Pro for Excel is a great tool for less savvy users
Unlike the other Copilot Pro tools, Copilot for Excel is labelled prominently as ‘beta’. But even in this state, it has the promise of being a game-changer for anyone who needs to work with data, but doesn’t want to become an expert in writing formulas, working out the best way to pivot data or spotting trends in large data sets.
Copilot for Excel exists in the toolbar, but sometimes it’s grayed out. That’s because it only works on .xlsx or .xlsm files saved in OneDrive or SharePoint. When the button is green, hitting it allows you to write natural language instructions to create formulas, analyze data, or highlight cells according to whatever criteria you want. If you’ve ever struggled with creating a complex formula (or even a simple one), you’re going to love it.
The first thing to note is that Copilot only works within tables; if your data is unstructured, it won’t let you do anything with it. This probably isn’t a big deal for most people (every serious Excel user I have known has lived or died by tables), but it’s a limitation that may affect some users of large and disparate data sets.
If your data is in a table, Copilot is miraculous. You can ask simple queries, such as how much you spent between two dates, or what categories you spend the most on. It’s also great at creating graphs: just type, ‘make a pie chart showing expenditure based on month’. You can manipulate data by asking it to use conditional formatting to highlight ranges, something that’s easy to get wrong for people who aren’t Excel experts.
You can also use Copilot to look for outliers in the data and highlight them, which helps if you’re trying to clean up a dataset or are finding that the results aren’t what you think they should be. If you’re using a big dataset, that’s a time saver. It’s nothing that you can’t do with Excel’s existing tools, but for users who don’t live in Excel, it would involve quite a bit of searching to know where to start.
The real power kicks in when you ask it to make formulas for you. I created a table of expenditure for a small business, tracking spending across categories, but I also wanted to have a column indicating the running total of my expenditure. This isn’t easy to make if you don’t know much about Excel, because it involves a SUMIF function that’s based on the row’s date, comparing it to others in the table.
I asked Copilot to ‘add formula columns to summarize total expenditure so far in this date sequence’, and it created a formula and added it to the table.
This kind of formula creation is going to save users of Excel hours. If you regularly work with data, but wouldn’t call yourself an expert, it’s probably worth the money on its own. Even on occasions where I wanted to do something I knew how to do, I found myself using Copilot instead, because it created better results than the various hacks, shortcuts, and cheats I’d learned. –IAN BETTERIDGE
COPILOT PRO FOR OUTLOOK
Of greatest use to people who are sent long, rambling emails or struggle to compose quick replies
There are three key features in Copilot for Outlook: summarization, drafting, and coaching. Summarization is probably the feature you’ll encounter first, as every email you receive has a prominent ‘Summary by Copilot’ bar at the top.
Click on this, and it creates a summary of the key points in the email. How useful this will be depends on the kind of mail you get, but if you spend a long time reading complex emails and trying to work out what the point is, you’ll love it.
The second main feature, drafting, is like the drafting feature in Word—you give it a prompt, and it writes the email for you. You can vary the tone using pop-up options—direct, neutral, casual, formal or, erm, ‘make it a poem’—and set the length as short, medium, or long. Outlook uses the last tone you selected, so if you decide to write a poem, change it before drafting an email to your accountant.
As with Word, I’d categorize the results as ‘something to start with and
personalize’ rather than the finished article. Tonally, it veers towards the extreme: formal is very formal, and casual is fine for sending to family and friends. In my tests, direct produced the best results, although some of its phrases required toning down to stop them sounding like the kind of email you get from the bailiffs chasing you for a late payment.
My favorite feature is coaching. This checks the content of an email and gives you tips on how to improve it, with clear advice that’s actually useful. It advised me to make my tone more confident, which professional writing coaches have told me in the past. –IAN BETTERIDGE
COPILOT PRO FOR ONENOTE
Don’t expect anything radical, but this is a handy enhancement for inveterate note-takers
It could be because I tried Copilot in OneNote after all the other apps. It could be a because I’m not a regular OneNote user. Or it could be that this is a, ‘Oh, I suppose we should add it to OneNote as well’ kind of effort.
Copilot appears in OneNote the same way as most other apps: as a button in the Home ribbon. You can do all the things you’d expect, such as summarizing meeting notes and creating action points. But where in Teams it feels powerful and integrated, here it feels like an add-on.
For example, I hoped that it would tie in with the transcription option, perhaps creating a rival to Otter.ai that
not only delivered the notes but gave me something extra. But no, it couldn’t even remove the timestamps from the text when I accidentally kept them in.
You’ll also need to be careful about where you file notes, as Copilot has some difficulty discerning between the active note and all the ones filed within a project. Mind you, the fact that it can work across a bunch of collated notes has its advantages, too.
Copilot in OneNote performed best when working with my scrawled notes from a meeting, deducing that when I wrote some names next to “Who?” that these were indeed the people involved.
If you’re a OneNote fan then you’ll probably like what Copilot Pro can do. But I can’t see this making any new converts.
–TIM DANTON