Copilot in Microsoft 365: Two Ways to Skip the Retyping

Every office I walk into has at least one person who opens Outlook on Monday morning to a thread forty messages deep, with three attachments and two people who got added halfway through. They read the whole thing top to bottom, then write a reply that mostly repeats what four other people already said. That is an hour gone before 9:30, and Copilot in Microsoft 365 would have handled the first forty minutes of it.

It is sitting right there in that same window. In my classes I would say four out of five people have never once clicked it — not because they are resistant to it, but because nobody showed them where the button is or what to type into it. In a lot of companies the license is already paid for and going unused.

So here are two things it does genuinely well. Neither takes more than five minutes to learn, and you can use both tomorrow morning on real work.

Copilot in Microsoft 365, Tip One: Let Outlook Read the Long Thread for You

Open the monster thread in the new Outlook for Windows, or in Outlook on the web. At the very top of the reading pane, above the first message, there is a collapsed banner that says Summary by Copilot. Click it and you get five or six bullets covering what was decided, what is still open, and who said what.

The part most people miss: each bullet has a small numbered citation after it, like [3]. Click the number and Outlook jumps you to the exact message that claim came from. That is what makes the summary trustworthy enough to act on, because you can spot-check any line in two seconds instead of taking it on faith.

Then stay in the thread and hit Reply. In the toolbar above the message body, click the Copilot icon and choose Draft with Copilot. Type your instruction in plain English, the way you would tell an assistant:

Reply agreeing to the Thursday date, ask Dana for the final headcount, and say I will send the handouts Monday.

Before you insert it, click Generate options (the small slider icon in the draft box) and set the tone to Direct and the length to Short. The default is a chatty medium-length draft that reads like a press release. Direct and Short is what I use for almost everything, and it is the difference between a draft you edit and a draft you delete. On a forty-message thread this reliably saves me twenty minutes, because editing is a much faster mode than composing from a blank box.

The gotcha: Copilot only sees the messages inside that one thread. If somebody forwarded a side conversation to you separately, or the real answer is buried in an attached spreadsheet, it is not in the summary — and Copilot will summarize confidently right around the hole without telling you anything is missing. That is exactly what the citation numbers are for.

Tip Two: Draft a New Word Document from One You Already Wrote

This is the one that gets the biggest reaction in class, because everybody has a document they rebuild from scratch every quarter.

In Word, open a new blank document. Copilot appears right in the body of the page, or you can go to the Home tab and click Copilot → Draft with Copilot. Now, in that prompt box, type a forward slash: /

Word drops down a list of your recent documents. That is the whole trick. Instead of describing what you want in words, you point Copilot at a document you already wrote and tell it what to change:

/Q2-Status-Report.docx Write the Q3 version of this using the same section headings and the same tone, and leave every number blank so I can fill them in.

What comes back is a draft that follows the structure of your own document — your headings, your section order, your house phrasing — not a generic template written by somebody who has never seen your business. You can reference more than one file in a single prompt, too: point it at last quarter’s report and last week’s meeting notes, and ask it to fold the decisions into the report structure.

The gotcha: the file you reference with the slash has to live in OneDrive or SharePoint. A document sitting on your C: drive, your desktop, or a mapped network drive will not show up in that picker at all, and that is almost always why the file you want is missing. Save a copy to OneDrive and it appears. And check every figure it carries over — it is perfectly happy to bring last quarter’s revenue number into this quarter’s report and present it as fact.

Plenty more on the calendar

If you want to go deeper on this, I am running Copilot for Business Professionals on Friday, October 30. We go through Copilot across the apps you actually live in — Outlook, Word, Excel, Teams and PowerPoint — including how to write prompts that get a usable answer the first time, and where Copilot is still not good enough to trust. Bring your own examples.

The full current schedule is always on the front page of PCWebinars.com, with new dates going up as they get confirmed. Register for this one if Copilot is what you need, or browse the others — there are sessions on Excel, Power BI, Access, ChatGPT and Claude coming up.

About your trainer

I am Tom Fragale. I have been a computer trainer and consultant for more than 30 years, and I have taught well over 30,000 people how to get more out of the software they already own — Excel, Access, Power BI, Word, Outlook, and now the AI tools that sit on top of all of it: Claude, ChatGPT, and Microsoft Copilot. My background is applied, not theoretical. Alongside the teaching, I build real databases and reporting systems for clients in Excel, Access, and Power BI, so the examples I use in class are the problems I ran into last week, not textbook exercises. I also publish free tutorials on YouTube and longer courses online.

If any of this was useful, there is a lot more of it waiting for you at PCWebinars.com — free articles, the full class schedule, and recordings.