In our new blog series, we want to shed some light on Microsoft Copilot – Microsoft’s integrated artificial intelligence, based on OpenAI, for the Microsoft 365 productivity suite. Throughout the process we will test the integration within the various Office applications, and we will close with some insights to the Microsoft Copilot Studio. Please read our kick-off article as well.
Contents
Introduction
In the last article we already kicked off this topic. In this article we will look at the features for Microsoft Word and Excel.
The integration works for both, the cloud apps of Microsoft and the locally installed ones. Important to mention is, that Administrators need to move corporate devices to the "current update channel". Otherwise users can't use the integration in the locally installed versions and will partially only work in online apps.
Copilot in Word
"Copilot in Word transforms your writing with efficiency and creativity – create, summarize, comprehend, refine, and elevate your documents. Now you can use enhanced capabilities like visualizing and transforming text into a table. Some other capabilities also include adding onto existing prompts, drafting a document by referencing up to 3 documents and discovering information about your document." [Microsoft]
I keep it simple as most of those features are known from ChatGPT. They are helpful in case you are writing articles and documents by yourself quite often and want to see a different perspective on them (by rewriting them in a different style). It can also be helpful if you don't get time to read a long document and need a summary on it (I recommend using this feature with care - you will never be able to summarize a scientific 50-pager properly into 10 sentences without missing very important information!).
Here you find some useful prompts for Microsoft Word.
Overall, the performance and features are good enough to integrate it in Microsoft's powerful text editing tool. I am wondering if the speech to text function could benefit from it as well.
Copilot in Excel
"Copilot in Excel works alongside you to help analyze and explore your data. Copilot can help you explore and understand your data better. It helps analyze and visualize your data. Highlight, filter, and sort your data." [Microsoft]
Copilot in Excel is still in Preview and it also feels a little bit like this here and there. I wouldn't say there is much of a benefit to a standard Excel user as standard Excel operations are not really accelerated by using Copilot. There are definitely benefits for Excel power users as you can add formulas, highlight, sort and filter, analyse, visualise and automate. I see a lot of potential for business analysis related tasks, and I am sure this will be possible one day in the very near future.
I highly recommend to read this blog post article to dive in deeper.
Conclusion
Copilot in Word and Excel can definitely help you to save some time in your day-to-day work. It is important to mention that learning how to use it properly also takes time and the most efficient way is probably an internally or externally organised training. Especially in the beginning it's very time consuming to get up to speed with formulating prompts properly.
In the next article we will investigate Copilot in Outlook and Teams.
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