How to Use Microsoft Copilot: Know Which One You Have, Then Prompt It Properly

Microsoft Copilot is probably the AI assistant you already have, whether you asked for it or not. It sits in Windows, in Edge, in the Copilot app and inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. The catch is that "Copilot" covers several products with different abilities, and what yours can do depends on how you sign in and what you pay for. This guide explains how to use Microsoft Copilot properly: how to work out which version you have, how to write prompts it handles well, what it's genuinely good at in each Office app and where it lets you down.

Which Microsoft Copilot are you using?

Most confusion about Copilot comes from one name covering very different setups. In August 2026 Microsoft merged its consumer Copilot app and the Microsoft 365 Copilot app into a single app, so they now look alike, but what happens behind the screen still depends on the account you sign in with:

• Free Copilot with a personal account — chat with answers from the web, file uploads and image creation, all subject to usage limits. You can use it without signing in, but a Microsoft account adds chat history, longer conversations and voice.
• Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, Premium or Pro — Copilot also appears inside the desktop Office apps, but only for the subscription owner; other members of a Family plan get chat only. Usage is capped by monthly AI credits, and Premium adds higher limits plus agents such as Researcher and Analyst.
• Copilot Chat with a work or school account — included with most business Microsoft 365 plans. It answers from the web and from files you upload or have open, under your organisation's data protection, but it can't search your mailbox or SharePoint by itself.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot (the paid business add-on) — the full version. It can draw on your emails, files, meetings and chats through Microsoft Graph, works across the Office apps with priority access and includes the Researcher and Analyst agents.

Two other products share the name but are separate: GitHub Copilot is a coding assistant, and Copilot Studio is a tool for building custom agents for an organisation. Neither is covered here.

The quickest check is the app itself. Work accounts show a "Work" label under your profile and a green shield, which means your prompts are covered by Microsoft's enterprise data protection. If you don't see either, you're in the personal version and shouldn't paste in company material your employer hasn't approved.

Getting started: the app, your accounts and the modes

You can reach Copilot from the Copilot app on the web, Windows, Mac, iPhone and Android, from the Copilot icon in Edge and from the Copilot button in Microsoft 365 apps. The same chat follows you between devices if you're signed in with the same account. Since the merger you can add a personal and a work account to one app and switch between them; Microsoft keeps the two separate, so nothing from your work tenant leaks into personal chats or the other way round.

Three controls are worth finding on day one:

• The model selector — Auto lets Copilot pick a model for each prompt, Quick response favours speed for simple questions, and Think deeper uses a reasoning model that plans and checks its work before answering. Use Think deeper for analysis and multi-step questions; it's slower, so skip it for quick rewrites.
• Attachments — the paperclip or plus button lets you upload a file or, in the work version, pick one from OneDrive. In Copilot Chat this is the main way to give it your own material.
• Privacy settings — on a personal account, open your profile settings and review whether your conversations can be used to train Microsoft's models and what Copilot remembers about you. Work accounts follow your organisation's policies instead.

In Edge, Copilot can also summarise the page or PDF you have open, which is faster than copying text into a separate chat.

How to write prompts Copilot understands

Microsoft's own guidance breaks a good Copilot prompt into four parts: the goal (what you want), the context (why you need it and who it's for), the source (which files, emails or pages to use) and the expectations (format, length and tone). Only the goal is required, but each extra part removes a guess. It's the same idea behind the advice in our guide on how to use ChatGPT, with one twist: in Microsoft 365, the source can be your own documents.

Compare "write a project update" with this:

A few habits make a bigger difference in Copilot than in a standalone chatbot:

• Name the source — in a work account with the full licence, "from the emails Sam sent me this week" and "using the Q3 budget spreadsheet" keep Copilot from wandering through everything it can access.
• Say what not to do — "don't invent figures" or "if the file doesn't say, write 'not stated'" reduces filler.
• Iterate in the same chat — Microsoft itself expects some back and forth. "Shorter", "more formal" or "turn that into a table" works better than starting over.
• Save what works — the work version has a prompt gallery where you can save and share prompts. Our prompt templates library is a good source of structures to adapt.

Copilot in Word and Outlook

Writing is where Copilot is most consistently useful, because the result is easy to check and quick to fix. In Word it can draft from a prompt or a reference file, rewrite a selected paragraph, summarise a long document and answer questions about it. The best results come from giving it material rather than asking it to write from nothing:

For editing, select a passage and ask for a specific change: "make this paragraph half the length without losing the deadline", or "rewrite for readers with no legal background". Asking Copilot to "improve" text tends to produce longer, blander prose.

In Outlook, Copilot can summarise a long thread, draft a reply and give coaching on tone and clarity before you send. Summaries are the quickest win when you come back from holiday:

Read drafts before sending. Copilot is good at structure and polite phrasing but can soften a firm "no" into a maybe, or promise something you didn't intend. Our AI prompts for email cover more situations, from chasing invoices to declining requests.

Copilot in Excel and PowerPoint

In Excel, Copilot can explain a dataset, suggest and write formulas, add calculated columns, build charts and PivotTables and point out trends or outliers. It works most reliably when your data has a single header row, no merged cells and consistent values in each column, so tidy the sheet first or format the range as a table. Then ask concrete questions:

Always check the formula it writes, especially ranges, absolute references and how it treats blanks. A plausible-looking chart built on the wrong column is the classic Excel Copilot mistake. Our AI prompts for data analysis go further on asking the right questions of a dataset.

In PowerPoint, Copilot can create a deck from a prompt or from an existing Word document, summarise a long presentation, add slides and images and apply formatting across the whole deck. Building from a document is far more useful than building from a one-line prompt, because the content is already yours:

Expect a solid first draft, not a finished deck. For slide structure and storytelling, see our AI prompts for presentations.

Copilot in Teams and with your work data

With the full Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, the big difference is that Copilot can search your work data. It can answer "what did we agree with the supplier about delivery dates?" by looking through the emails, chats, files and meetings you already have permission to see. In Copilot Chat without that licence, you have to upload or open the material yourself.

In Teams, Copilot can summarise chats and channels, and in meetings that are transcribed it can recap the discussion, list action items and answer questions such as "what did Priya say about the budget?" during or after the call. Ask for structure rather than a general summary:

Beyond chat, the paid licence includes agents: Researcher for multi-step research reports that combine web and work sources, and Analyst for working through data. Organisations can also build their own agents, and Microsoft is previewing Cowork, which carries out tasks across Microsoft 365 for you. These are agents in the sense explained in our guide to what AI agents are: useful for longer jobs, but worth checking step by step.

Microsoft Copilot vs ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude

Copilot uses OpenAI's GPT models, and on some business plans Anthropic's Claude models too, so the raw writing quality is often similar to other assistants. The real difference is where it lives:

• Choose Copilot when your work is already in Microsoft 365. Drafting in Word, recapping a Teams meeting or querying your own email is where it beats copying and pasting into another tool, and work accounts come with enterprise data protection your IT team has already approved.
• Choose ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude for open-ended writing, brainstorming, coding and long conversations, where their own apps tend to offer more features and fewer admin restrictions.
• Use Gemini instead if your organisation runs on Google Workspace; it plays the same role there.

Our list of ChatGPT alternatives compares the main options in more depth.

What Microsoft Copilot can't do

Knowing how to use Microsoft Copilot well also means knowing where it falls short:

• It can still be wrong — grounding in your files reduces errors but doesn't remove them. It can misread a spreadsheet, merge two meetings or state an assumption as fact. Check every figure, name and date before it leaves your hands. Our explainer on AI hallucinations covers why this happens.
• Your data sets the ceiling — if your files are out of date, badly named or scattered across old versions, Copilot will find the wrong one and summarise it confidently.
• Features depend on your plan, region and admin — the same button may be missing for a colleague, and your organisation can switch off web search, image creation or agents. Free and standard access is also subject to capacity, so it can be slower at busy times.
• Features come and go — in August 2026 Microsoft retired Deep Research, Podcasts and Group Chat from the consumer app, and moved Tasks into Cowork. Don't build a routine around a feature without checking it's still there.
• It isn't a records system — a meeting recap is a summary, not minutes. For anything contractual or disputed, go back to the transcript or the document.
• Privacy is your responsibility on personal accounts — don't paste client data, health records or anything confidential into a personal Copilot just because it looks like the work version.

Used within those limits, Copilot is a practical assistant for the work you already do in Microsoft 365: drafting, summarising, analysing and catching up. Check which version you're in, give it a clear goal and the right source, ask for a specific format and read the result before you trust it.

References

• Microsoft Learn — What is Microsoft Copilot?
• Microsoft Support — What's the difference between Microsoft Copilot (free) and Copilot in Microsoft 365
• Microsoft Support — Get started writing prompts in Microsoft Copilot