Microsoft 365 Copilot | Features

Extra daily help in creating slide presentation graphics in a spreadsheet or a text document is always welcome. Or to summarise and analyze all the information in these files. And we’re not talking about human help: artificial intelligence helps you get the most out of PowerPoint, Excel, or Word. We are talking about Microsoft Copilot.

In March, we told you about the first features of Microsoft Copilot 365, but now Microsoft is launching a new update offering a much more personal experience. Let’s take a look at all the new features!

Microsoft Copilot: what it is

Copilot is an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that combines natural language with linguistic models, data, and Microsoft Graph to improve employee productivity using everyday applications such as Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, or PowerPoint.

As the name itself says, Copilot is an assistant, someone who helps you work to improve your performance or get you out of the most monotonous tasks. And at the same time, you remain the pilot, i.e., you control the business operations.

Copilot has been developed in collaboration with GitHub and OpenAI, whose GPT-4 language technology is integrated into the tool.

Windows 11 Update

With nearly 150 new features and the addition of the power of Copilot to the PC, Microsoft has released a new update to deliver better AI experiences, including:

• Copilot in Windows: helps you create faster, easily complete tasks and lowers the cognitive load on the user, making complicated tasks simple.
• Paint: One of the Windows classics has been enhanced with AI for digital creation and added background and layer removal functions, as well as a Cocreator preview, which brings the power of generative AI to this application.
• Clipchamp: now features automatic compositing, helping with scene suggestions, edits, and narration based on images and footage automatically so the user can create and edit videos more easily.
• Notes blog: will automatically start saving the session state, allowing it to be closed without interrupting any dialogue and pick up where it left off when the user returns.
• File Explorer: has been revamped and features an updated home, address bar, and search box designed to help people more easily access important and relevant content, stay on top of their activity, and collaborate without even opening a file.
• And much more.

New features in Bing and Edge

One of the new features of Copilot is the introduction of new functionality in Bing and Edge to enhance users’ everyday experience with the most advanced AI capabilities, such as:

• Personalized answers: now, Bing Chat history can influence search results with information proactively on related topics.
• Copilot in Microsoft Shopping: When asked for information about an item, Bing will ask additional questions to get more information and then move on to offer more personalized recommendations. This will also influence them to get the best price.
• OpenAI’s DALL.E 3 model in Bing Image Creator: This tool can make more aesthetic and detailed creations, as well as better understand what is being asked of it and provide more accurate images.
• Content credentials: As part of Microsoft’s commitment to creating responsive generative AI, new content credentials have been added that use cryptographic methods to add an invisible digital watermark to all AI-generated images in Bing.

Microsoft 365 Chat

Microsoft Copilot incorporates a tool called Microsoft 365 Chat. Linked to Microsoft 365 applications and the data generated by each user (chats, emails, notes…), it ‘listens’ to natural language to execute orders.

We already saw a preview with Business Chat, but the rapid advances of the last few months have taken it to another level. Microsoft 365 Chat reviews the entire universe of data at work, such as emails, meetings, chats, documents, etc., and the web. As an assistant, it has a deep understanding of the user, their work and priorities, as well as their organization. It goes far beyond simple questions and answers to advance some of the most complex or tedious tasks, whether it is drafting a strategic document, booking a business trip, or catching up on emails.

Designer

The latest addition to the Microsoft 365 suite, Designer, makes it possible to quickly create eye-catching visual effects, social media posts, invitations and more.

The expansion of generative AI for image stretching goes further, nurturing the image generation experience in Designer, making it easy to add higher quality original images to your design in seconds.

Microsoft 365 Copilot | Features

Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 in two ways. It works alongside the user, integrated into the Microsoft 365 applications you use daily (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams…) to increase productivity, access to data, and, in short, expand the user’s knowledge.

Here are some of the most confirmed features that add to the mythical Microsoft 365 package with Copilot.

Copilot features in Word

The arrival of Copilot in Word means having the best companion for writing, editing, accessing, and incorporating information and summarizing as quickly and accurately as possible: making a first draft, including info of interest, adding related documents… In addition, it can bring a personalized tone to each task by knowing the document’s recipients.

• Generate summaries based on other text documents.
• Suggest writing tones: professional, informal…
• Provide arguments to defend a thesis.
• Rewrite sections or highlight inconsistencies.
• Create text drafts based on outlines or structures.

Copilot Features in PowerPoint

Copilot in PowerPoint helps you turn your ideas into excellent presentations. If creativity is not your forte, Copilot becomes your ideal companion to tell stories in the best way. It can transform written documents into complete presentations, even with notes and fonts to reinforce your presentation. Or start a new slideshow from scratch from a simple prompt or outline. Condense long presentations at the touch of a button and adjust the layout, reformat text, or perfectly synchronize animations using your natural language prompts.

• Generate a draft slideshow with information from another file.
• Summarize presentations.
• Change the layout of a specific slide.
• Reduce text and synchronize it with animations already present in a presentation.

Copilot features in Excel

Copilot in Excel is here to facilitate data analysis and exploration. Forget formulas: simply ask about the presented dataset and access concrete answers, correlations, and what-if scenarios. It will also suggest new procedures and recipes for your questions, using models to help you explore your data.

Identify trends, create visualizations, and ask for recommendations to gain greater depth.

• In an Excel spreadsheet full of data and variables, filter out the highest or lowest values. This can be very useful to check, for example, the best-selling products, where the highest costs come from, or which categories are the most successful among the public.
• Create draft budgets or accounting.
• Generate graphs.
• Make assumptions about sales results and growth… by changing one of the variables.

Copilot features in Outlook

The time we spend managing e-mails is undoubtedly an obstacle to our maximum productivity. Copilot in Outlook is our best help to communicate better and faster. Summarize long and convoluted email threads with multiple people to understand at a glance not only what has been said but also each person’s different points of view and unanswered questions. Reply to an email with a simple prompt or turn quick notes into clear, defined messages from other emails or content you already have access to from Microsoft 365.

• Write email drafts based on information from other documents.
• Summarize message chains.
• By achieving the above two points, ‘clean up’ the inbox faster than usual.
• Mark the most important items or messages.

Copilot features in Teams

In Microsoft Teams, Copilot helps you organize more effective meetings and meeting highlights and summarize critical actions, so your team knows what to do next. In chat, Copilot answers specific questions or updates you on anything you missed.

Adding Copilot to your meetings and conversations gives you a powerful tool to help you with everyday tasks such as creating meeting agendas based on chat history, identifying the right people to follow up with, and scheduling monitoring meetings.

• Generate a list of possible topics to talk about in meetings.
• Also, generate meeting structure according to chat messages.
• Create meeting summaries for those who could not attend, were late, or would like a summary.

Copilot features in Power Apps

Copilot will enable application developers to work with machines and humans to create applications faster and easier. Using natural language models, developers will develop apps by describing their needs through conversation.

Copilot will also allow users to interact with data in a chatbot experience, creating queries and refining analysis more intuitively.

In addition, Power Virtual Agents chatbots have been integrated into Power Apps. This will make it easier for developers to add AI chatbots to their applications.

By including these tools, Microsoft hopes to lead the revolution in low-code application development and move towards creating transformative software in a natural language that everyone understands.

Copilot Features in Power Automate

Microsoft Power Automate has released two new features to enhance the platform: Copilot and Create text with GPT. The Describe it to design it, launched in October 2022, allowed you to type a simple sentence and create a workflow based on that description. With Copilot, the user will enhance and modify flows with AI-driven conversations. Users ask questions and receive help to make improvements and changes; natural language is used to create simple flows or complex business processes.

In addition, Microsoft has launched a new feature called Create text with GPT, allowing users to generate content in desktop workflows automatically. This can be useful for creating daily content, customer service, and extracting information from large amounts of text and documents, as it saves time compared to manual crawling.

In short, these new features help Power Automate users automate processes more intelligently, quickly, and efficiently.

We help you to take full advantage of the Microsoft Copilot possibilities

At Plain Concepts, we specialize in incorporating and powering your business applications through artificial intelligence on a large scale. We have designed a unique OpenAI Framework to ensure the correct application of these services, improve process efficiency, meet production needs, increase business-critical security, and enhance regional compliance and availability.

Suppose you want to learn more about which use cases best suit your business goals or how to leverage the capabilities of OpenAI models in your business. In that case, we help you unlock the full potential of generative AI!