5 everyday Microsoft 365 Copilot use cases you should know

Speaker: Martin Howe

[00:00] Introduction

Hi everyone. So today we’re going to focus on some Copilot everyday use cases.

Obviously, since it was first released, Copilot has changed quite a lot over the past few months. It’s moved from kind of answering your questions to actually doing the work for you, with each step improving, and there’s lots of different complicated things it can now go ahead and do.

This one’s going to be slightly different. We’re going to focus on more of the actual day-to-day general uses that you might use just to speed up your processes.

So rather than a features list, I’ll just walk through a couple of normal working day examples and show five things that Copilot can do that it couldn’t maybe do at the start of the year.

[00:44] Choosing a model in Copilot

Okay, cool. So next up is just a little tip itself when you’re just starting to use Copilot within the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, and it really refers to the dropdown that you can see up here.

So at the moment, we can see the word “Auto”, and if I hover over it, it says “Choose model”.

Now, when you use this dropdown and select the model, you’ll basically be presented with a few options. You can see here we’ve got Claude and GPT OpenAI models built in.

So basically, you can select the model for the task. The idea here is that you’re going to go ahead and pick the model that you feel is suitable for the task at hand.

At the moment, the models underneath Claude are SONNET 5, SONNET 5.5 and OPUS 5.5. Then underneath GPT, you’ve got GPT 5.6 quick response, GPT 6, GPT 5.6 think deeper and GPT 6.1.

So, a quick explainer on all of those.

Before I do that, actually, if you don’t care about any of that, you can just go ahead and let Copilot decide for you.

Auto is basically going to make an assumption, based on the task that you’ve asked, about what model to use.

Does it need something that’s just super quick and easy, and it’ll give you answers pretty quickly? Or are you doing a bit of research and you want it to think for a bit longer and ideally go through a lot of data to hopefully present you with a better answer?

Starting with Claude, SONNET 5. So it’s the previous SONNET. It’s faster and a little bit lighter than OPUS, and it’s good for your everyday drafting and writing.

We then have SONNET 5.5, the newer SONNET. This was added towards the back of September, and Microsoft describes that as efficient for everyday tasks. So, for a quicker turnaround on your more common work, essentially it’s a slight upgrade on SONNET 5.

Then you’ve got OPUS 5.5. So this is Anthropic’s heavier model within Claude. It’s for complex, higher-stakes work, which is how Microsoft positions it.

So, if you’re looking to do in-depth analysis and research, it’s slower, but it’s more thorough.

That’s the idea of the models that you’ve got there.

Then under GPT, you have GPT 5.6 quick response. That’s your fast option. It answers straight away without thinking and dragging out those longer steps. So it’s for routine questions where speed matters to you the most.

We then have GPT 6. This Microsoft page basically describes this as the latest model for tough problems, and I’m assuming GPT 6 in the menu means that it plugs into that specifically.

We then have GPT 5.6 think deeper. So that’s the same model as before, but now, as described, you’re just thinking a little bit deeper. It’s better for your complex or multi-part questions.

Then finally, GPT 6.1. GPT 6.1 is your newest GPT option, again added towards the back end of September, similar to Claude’s SONNET 5.5.

Microsoft again describes this as intelligent and efficient for hard work. So it’s a strong all-rounder.

There are a few different options, but just picking one of those will essentially tailor the response that you get back.

So it’s important that you consider the type of work that you’re asking Copilot to do.

It’s great that you can plug into these models as well, and if you have a preference and you prefer using Claude, I know I certainly do and I use Claude OPUS 5.5 for most things that I want to do, then great, I’m going to go ahead and use that.

So it’s just good to have those options within here, and you’re able to pick which one you think suits the task at hand.

[04:39] Using Copilot in Excel

Great. So here we are in an Excel document, and this Excel document is for sales data.

You can see down at the bottom here we’ve got invoices, payments, customers, products and who the sales team are.

I’m basing this off The Office US, but with some example sales data. Essentially, I just wanted to highlight some of the everyday things that you can do with this kind of data.

Whether it’s invoicing, sales, products and things like that, just what you can do within Excel.

So, nice and easily, what we’ll do is open up Copilot.

Now, Copilot used to live up in the top-right-hand corner. It’s now down at the bottom here, so clicking on that does the same thing and expands that panel for you.

You’ll notice here I’ve got the Copilot Premium licence. I am allowing it to edit at the moment, so I wanted it to go ahead and perhaps edit some of the data that we’ve got in here.

What we’ll do is start off with a nice, simple little prompt, which is going to be:

“Create a sales dashboard on a new sheet using the data in this workbook.”

So that’s exactly what it’s going to go ahead and do.

If I hit send, you’ll see Copilot start to do its thing. It’s going to give you a bit of a running narrative here as to actually what it’s going to go ahead and do for you.

You’ll see that update and change, whether it’s connecting the dots, crunching the data or planning the dashboard. It’ll almost give you this kind of step-by-step progress report or update as to actually what it’s doing for you.

You can click on the arrow here at the end of that to expand it, and it does go into a little bit more detail. You can kind of see the steps that are coming up next, what it’s worked through and essentially what it’s going to do for us.

It’s planning the dashboard, it’s going to set up the visual approach, confirm any rules for the actual build itself, and check all the data.

At the moment it’s working through validating the workbook structure, and straight away we’ve moved on to calculating the headline metric.

So we’ll be back in a second once that has gone ahead and created our new sales dashboard.

Remember, we asked for it on a brand-new tab, so that’s something really useful in Excel.

Okay, perfect. So it’s updated. It’s given us our 2026 sales performance dashboard.

Over on the right-hand side, within the Copilot panel, we can see it’s created the new live sales performance dashboard with KPIs, monthly trends, rep and category rankings, collections, top customers and a sales-by-rep filter as well.

So current headlines: $249,000, 87.4% target attainment, and it’s led by Mr Dwight Schrute.

I’m going to hit “Done” on there, and then we can just look to explore the dashboard here.

It’s given us a nice title for it, “Sales Performance Dashboard”.

Straight away, I can spot a filter here. So if I wanted to go and focus on Jim Halpert, great.

Now I can see all the Jim numbers in front of me here, which is really useful, and I can start to look and see exactly how Jim is performing.

So the invoice sales that he’s put through, what he’s collected, anything that’s still outstanding, how far he is away from that target, and then the average invoice order as well.

So, 38.9%. Jim’s got a little bit of work to do there in terms of the rest of the year.

But as we scroll down, we start to get more insights into this data, like monthly sales trends.

We can see the category mix as well, so what exactly Jim is selling, and collection positions as well, so what we’ve collected and what’s still outstanding.

Then Jim’s specific top customers as well. So, Alfredo’s Pizza Cafe ordering lots of paper from Jim.

Again, using the dropdown, we can go ahead and chop and change that and see how the other representatives are getting on, and then actually group them all together in that “All” category as well.

[08:18] Using Copilot in PowerPoint

Okay, some of the Copilot features are essentially now baked into PowerPoint, which is super useful.

You have a couple of options in the top-left-hand corner. You’ve got “New slide with Copilot”, and you also have “Interactive slide” as well.

“New slide with Copilot” is exactly that. It’s going to open up Copilot for you and basically ask you to finish the prompt.

Because you’ve clicked “New slide with Copilot”, the prompt is already started for you. They’ve already added “Add a slide about”, and you can just go ahead and finish off that prompt.

Your other option is to add an interactive slide, and you’ll see that there are a few default options underneath here that you can add with Copilot.

You’ve got a summary, a dashboard, a timeline, a comparison or something totally custom.

So if we go with “Add a comparison slide”, you can see it’s updated the prompt for us in the Copilot window here.

So, “Use create interactive slide to add a comparison”, and then you can go ahead and start adding some more context around the comparison that perhaps you’re looking to surface within this PowerPoint presentation.

As we have just done our Dunder Mifflin sales data, what we’re going to do is use that as context.

We’re going to drag our Excel document across into here, and we’re going to use that as context.

You can see now our Dunder Mifflin sales data is in here.

So: “Use create interactive slide to add a comparison. Let’s go between all the sales team and their performance so far from the Dunder Mifflin sales data Excel.”

Hit Enter and, of course, Copilot is going to go ahead and do that.

That was a pretty simple prompt.

One thing to consider when you are prompting and using Copilot is actually I didn’t give any information there on brand or how I want it to look, feel or appear.

It does, of course, come back with some options for me as well.

So, what visual style should the sales team comparison use? Do we want a modern dark dashboard? Do we want something clean, light and corporate? Or do we want that warm, paper-friendly company that Dunder Mifflin is?

It’s saying cream and ink tones with a friendly Dunder Mifflin office feel.

We’re going to go with that one.

We’ll hit confirm, and then it’s going to start to generate our PowerPoint for us.

For scenarios like this, if you have Excel data you need to link to a PowerPoint, and that PowerPoint then needs to be presented back to maybe different locations that you have, different sites, or maybe different particular meetings that you might have, whether it’s back to the board or back to a specific team, Copilot is a really great way to use that data from your Excel file and plug that straight into a PowerPoint presentation.

Again, Copilot is giving us the progress update that it’s making.

It’s building a warm, clickable sales team comparison, and that’s the point there: clickable. We have used an interactive slide, so we’re going to go ahead and see how interactive it is.

We’ll let Copilot do its thing. We’ll be back in a second once that’s done, and then we’ll have a look at what it’s produced.

Okay, great. So we have our new “Sales Team vs 2026 Target”, based off the information that we had within our Excel document.

All of the data that is in there pulls through into the presentation that we have in front of us here.

Copilot will give us a bit of an output and just explain what it’s done.

So:

“I’ve added a clickable sales team comparison to slide one using a warm cream and ink style with rust highlights. It covers invoices from 1st January to 28th October. In my render, it displays correctly and the layout check passed at two slide sizes. I haven’t tested the clicking in PowerPoint itself.”

That’s what we’ll go and do in a second.

What it shows: we have rankings. All seven reps are ranked by sales, with each rep’s bar set against their 2026 target.

We have the switching comparison, so four buttons change what the bars show. We’ve got sales versus target, collection rate, outstanding balance or number of invoices.

We can see the rep details. Clicking on a rep opens up a panel with their percentage of target, monthly sales from January to October, best month, invoice, collected, outstanding, overdue and customer counts.

Then, what the data says: the team has invoiced $249.1k, which is 87% of the combined target.

We knew all of this stuff actually from when we did this in the Excel document, and it gives a quick summary there.

So here we go. Let’s have a little look at the data.

We can see all the information in front of us. We’ve got all the sales reps there as well, we’ve got some stats and figures as to what the team invoiced, and then we can see specifically the card here for Mr Dwight Schrute.

So, 133% of target, and it surfaces that he’s $19,000 ahead.

Let’s have a little look through. If I go ahead and click on Michael Scott, we can see the card updates. We can see Michael’s figures just here, and again, clicking through, we can see those cards update.

We then have the collection rates as well. Again, that’s surfaced here too.

Clicking on the rep brings back the other cards, what we saw before, anything outstanding, and then any invoices as well.

So, yeah, a really useful tool within PowerPoint using Copilot.

Of course, this was just one slide that we were able to do, and one slide that we’ve been able to generate quite quickly as well.

Should you need to create a few of these presentations, perhaps one, as I said before, maybe broken down per site or per location or per demographic of the business that you need to report back to, then great.

You can go ahead and chop this data exactly how you’d like to, just by interacting with Copilot.

Again, using the features within here to add interactive slides, pull on that data from some of your existing files and surface that information in a really quick and efficient way.

Of course, do bear in mind that the prompt I put in initially wasn’t a detailed prompt.

There may be scenarios where you need to put in more detail. You’ve been asked for certain requirements on how you need to present this back, on a particular focus or a particular way of cutting the data, whether you’d like it reported by month, quarter, person, location and so on.

It’s done a good job just based on the actual amount of detail that we put in here so far.

But again, with more data, more information and better prompting, we’re able to go ahead and refine a lot of this and make sure we’re surfacing the data that we need.

[15:10] Finding prompts in Prompt Lab

Okay, once you’ve selected your model, or you’re leaving it on Auto, you can go ahead and prompt in whatever you want into the Microsoft 365 Copilot app.

We spoke earlier about prompting, and prompting is something you get better at the more that you use it.

You’ll start to put in some Copilot prompts, you’ll look at what it gives back to you and you think, “That’s not quite what I asked”, or, “It’s not what I meant.”

Then, when you reread actually your initial entry, you think, “Okay, I could have made it a little bit clearer.”

So prompting is really important.

To help with prompting, you do have a few suggestions of different prompts that you can fire into the Copilot box straight away: suggestions, file insights, inbox triage, people search or meeting prep.

Fairly typical tasks that we would all go ahead and do, maybe on a weekly basis.

I like this here: “More prompts”.

If you click on “More prompts”, you’re then taken into the Prompt Lab.

Admittedly, I didn’t know half of these were in here, but there’s some really good stuff in here that will just help you maybe start off your prompts in potentially a way that you didn’t think about before.

Whether you’re looking to analyse data, you can see here loads of different options in this “Analyse” section.

As an example, “Compare options A versus B”.

So, compare the pros and cons of option A versus option B for a project or topic.

Do remember, project or topic, option A and option B, you can make it relevant to you, your role, the files and Teams chats and Teams channels that you have access to.

Because Copilot is licensed to you as a user, it bakes in your permissions, and you’re able to ask it to prompt around documentation, chats, channels, files and information that you have access to specifically.

So it can’t go rogue.

“Analyse” looks pretty useful.

We then have this “Ask” section here. Asking what the agenda of the event or meeting is and who the attendees are, great. I’m sure you’ll need to enter the actual event itself.

Common issues: what are the most common questions about a certain topic?

Compare file to file, group by differences in format and structure and content.

Again, some nice little example prompts that you can look to use, and there’s absolutely loads in here, broken down into prompt topics.

Then you’ve got agent prompts as well.

Agent prompts are for the agents that you can use within Copilot.

You can see here, actually, we’ve got a couple of agents that we’ve created just to help with some of our processes.

Whether we’re putting proposals together, if we want to complete a supplier questionnaire, we have things to help us with tenders as well.

Again, you can enter suggestions into the Prompt Lab for those specific agents, and you can see those two Valto ones that I’m hovering over there.

You’ve got those agent prompts, and the prompt topics are really useful.

Do certainly have a look at these. It’s just a little tip that I feel goes under the radar when using Copilot, and it can just help you start off that prompt if you’re struggling with ways to actually convey to Copilot what it is that you’re looking to have it answer for you.

[18:24] Creating your own Copilot agent

Okay, so Copilot agents.

One thing that is often not looked at when you’re in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app is looking at agents.

Agents are basically Copilot chats that are specific to one particular task or thing.

We have a few of these. You can see some of these in my pinned section. We have a tender scoring agent, we have the Valto proposal estimator and we have our tender agent.

Essentially, these are agents that we’ve created here internally at Valto that have sets of instructions or particular document libraries that they look at to help surface information for queries that go into that agent.

Setting up an agent is actually a lot easier than what most people think.

In order to set up your agents, or your first agent, have a little look on the left-hand side. You’ll see “Agents” here.

Click on that and this little pop-up will open.

You can pick from some of them that are in here, no problem at all. Some are just given to you by default, PowerPoint, Excel, Word and so on, all agents to help you with those particular pieces of kit.

Or you’ve got “New agent” or “More agents”.

When you click “New agent”, you’re taken to essentially another Copilot chat, but this is actually helping you to build that agent.

There are some templates that you can use as examples here.

You can have “Plan my day”, a project digest, an executive briefing agent. Click on “View all” and there are absolutely loads of suggestions and templates here.

There are predefined agents from Microsoft that you can click, tweak and adjust where you need to, and then set up as an agent.

Really useful.

So, let’s have a look at the writing coach.

Writing coach boosts effectiveness and supports refining writing. Let’s click on that.

Essentially, it’s going to open up the panel on the right-hand side where we can change the title for our agent, change the instructions, plug in some skills, and plug in some knowledge from different areas as well.

Then we can even have suggested prompts.

Because it’s done a lot of this for us, essentially the writing coach agent comes with these instructions:

“You are a writing coach. Your role is to provide detailed and constructive feedback on the following pieces of writing and assist with writing tasks.”

Then skill number one is coach me on existing text. Skill number two, help me change the tone of an email. Skill number three, translate a piece of text into another language. Skill number four, teach me how to write instructions. Number five, help me write a story. Six, help me write a white paper, and so on.

Now, you may decide that actually you never write white papers, so you do not need to do that. Let’s just get rid of that.

You can do that if you hit “Edit instructions” and highlight the pieces that you don’t want.

Great. You may decide you don’t want that at all. It’s not for you. You don’t write white papers.

Then you can preview the rest of the instructions here.

Because you’re using Copilot, you can use Copilot to build the agent as well.

Say, for example, you didn’t want to go ahead and use one of the predefined templates.

If we go to “New agent”, close this down and, instead of using one of the templates here, we can use and interact with Copilot to help build an agent ourselves.

So it might be that:

“I would like an agent who will summarise my inbox at the end of each day.”

Hit Enter, and then I’m basically using Copilot to talk to it and refine my agent.

It starts using the same builder that we saw before, and it’s basically going to start asking me some questions to help me refine the instructions, the skills, the knowledge and the other pieces that we need for this agent.

So, should each daily inbox summary follow a fixed checklist?

Yes, absolutely it should.

Yes, we would like action items to be at the top.

Hit Enter.

Great. It’s just clarifying our requirements, and then we’ll see the agent go ahead and be built over on the right-hand side in our panel just here.

It’s going to create some new skills for us as well.

So we’ll go ahead, let Copilot rattle through this, and then we’ll come back and see what it does.

Okay, perfect. So it’s done it.

It’s drafted the “Daily Inbox Brief”, which is what it’s called our agent, with email access and a reusable daily summary skill.

So action items will appear first. They’re ranked by urgency, deadline and impact.

Remaining mail is grouped into updates, approvals and information-only items.

There’s an automatic end-of-day scheduling option that requires copying the agent from the top-right menu into the full Copilot Studio experience.

So, great. We can go ahead and do that and put that into Copilot Studio if we so wish.

Then it says preview, and we can give it a spin if we want to.

But just looking at the information it’s put in here, this is now our opportunity to make sure that we’re happy with this agent.

We’re essentially happy with the instructions, the skills, the knowledge and everything else that this agent is going to do.

Looking at the title, “Daily Inbox Brief”. Yeah, fine. I’m happy with that.

A quick description, so if other people potentially want to use it, they know exactly what it does:

“It summarises each working day’s inbox with action items first, followed by important updates, decisions, approvals and information-only messages. It highlights deadlines, response obligations and items due by the next working day, so you can close out the day with a clear follow-up list.”

Cool. Sounds good to me.

Instructions, so the purpose:

“Help the user finish each working day with a concise, trustworthy inbox briefing that prioritises actions and deadlines.”

Then there are some general guidelines that it’s put into place here.

Use a clear, professional, practical tone. Focus on emails from the requested day or date range. Keep action items at the top and mark ownership, deadlines and urgency.

Distinguish explicit requests from possible follow-ups. Ground claims in the available email content. Do not invent deadlines, commitments or sender intent.

Good. Don’t want it to do that.

Consolidate repeated messages and long threads into one useful entry.

Yes, please. We are all victims of being CC’d into very long email threads, and that is going to save me scrolling through all of it.

Protect sensitive information. Fine, happy with that.

If email access isn’t available or no messages are found, explain the limitation briefly and suggest a narrower or corrected date range.

Fine. No problem at all.

Then, skills.

When the user asks for an end-of-day inbox summary or a prioritised daily email recap, invoke “Daily Inbox Summary”, which is a skill.

It’s a skill that it’s created here.

So we’ve got this skill and, essentially, for a bit more information on skills and for maybe those that aren’t familiar, skills give your agent specialised, reusable capabilities, packaged as a ZIP file with one top-level skill folder containing a skill.md manifest and related files.

So essentially, our agent has this skill here.

You can click on that and you can basically open up this skill.

The skill essentially does a lot of what we’ve just seen in the instructions tab here. We can see the purpose, but this time we’re just focusing on that skill and that skill alone.

Great. So if we go back, the skill is baked in. That’s all good.

We then have this knowledge section here.

The knowledge section basically allows you to add in platforms that you have access to, whether that is files, Outlook, Teams or any other connectors that you have access to.

Do you want it to be able to search the web? Is there a specific attachment that you’d like to upload into this?

Perhaps your inbox summary needs to be in a certain format every single time and you have those formatting rules documented.

You can just attach that formatting rules documentation and it’ll do the same every single time.

So, yeah, we can toggle those on and off if we want to. We can add knowledge or just drop files into there as well.

Really useful.

Then there’s the suggested prompts down at the bottom.

For people who are unfamiliar with your agent, if you are allowing others to use this within the business, it might be a good idea to come with some suggested prompts.

So:

“Summarise today.”

“Show me my urgent actions.”

“Brief yesterday and focus on my team.”

“Summarise today’s inbox, prioritising requests and follow-ups involving my sales team.”

“Create an end-of-day inbox summary from yesterday with actions first.”

“Review today’s emails and highlight anything I need to do before the next working day.”

“Summarise today’s inbox and put my action items at the top.”

So if I’m happy with that, I just hit “Create”.

That creates the agent for me. It’s then available for me to use within the Agents dropdown here.

I’m able to go ahead and select that and then start to ask it to interact with my inbox in a way that I want to, and give me that summary as I need to and as I request it.

Do bear in mind, you can tweak your input into that agent.

Just because you have these instructions and you’ve got certain knowledge and skills baked into it, you can still ask for things to be presented in a different way if you want to while you’re using that agent, just as you would with normal Copilot Chat.

So, yeah, hopefully that was helpful.

That gives you a bit of a summary of how you can look to build agents.

Those agents become available to you within Copilot, and you can go ahead and start utilising them in a way that is useful to you and your working day.

[28:00] Summary

Cool. So there we go.

We’ve looked at a few different everyday use cases of Microsoft 365 Copilot.

We looked at Copilot in Excel. We’ve seen it build an interactive PowerPoint. We’ve looked at the OpenAI and available Anthropic models within Copilot.

We’ve also looked at the Prompt Lab and some of the templates that we can use in there.

We’ve also looked at how you can go ahead and build your own agent and actually use Copilot Agent Builder chat to build the agent itself and help you tweak the instructions, knowledge and skills that come with that.

So hopefully that was useful.

Do give our channel a like and a follow. It is really appreciated, and we’ll continue to produce content like this so long as there’s still the ask for it.

Thank you very much.