Copilot in Outlook: Two Ways to Clear Your Inbox Faster

Most people I train do not have an email problem. They have a re-reading problem. The message came in on Tuesday, three people replied, someone forwarded it to two more, and by Thursday there are forty messages in the thread and you are scrolling to the top to work out what anybody actually decided. Copilot in Outlook is built for exactly that moment, and almost nobody uses it, because the button sits in a spot you would never look at unless somebody showed you.

I see the same thing with meeting notes. The meeting happens, everyone nods, and the follow-up list lives in one person’s notebook until it quietly dies.

Here are two things you can do this afternoon. Neither one takes ten minutes to learn, and both of them work on email and meetings you already have sitting there.

Tip 1: Use Copilot in Outlook to summarize a long thread before you reply

Open any long email conversation in Outlook (the new Outlook for Windows, or Outlook on the web). At the very top of the reading pane, above the first message, there is a small banner that says Summary by Copilot. Click it. You get a short bulleted recap of the thread with numbered citations, and each citation is clickable — click [3] and Outlook jumps you to the exact message that claim came from.

That last part is the reason to trust it. You are not taking the summary’s word for anything; you are using it as a table of contents for a thread you never wanted to read twice.

Then take it one step further. In the same conversation, open the Copilot pane and ask a real question instead of accepting the generic summary:

• What did we agree on about the September deadline, and who agreed to it?
• List every open question in this thread that nobody has answered yet.
• Draft a reply that confirms the three action items and asks Dana to confirm the budget number.

The third one uses Draft with Copilot, which lives in the message body when you hit Reply — look for the pencil icon. Give it a tone and a length. “Short, direct, no pleasantries” produces something you can actually send. The default setting produces something that reads like a greeting card.

The gotcha: Copilot only reads what is in that thread. If half the decision was made in a Teams chat or on a phone call, the summary will confidently describe an incomplete picture. It is not lying to you, it just cannot see the rest. Always skim the citations on anything you are about to forward to your boss.

Tip 2: Turn a meeting into an action list instead of a transcript

If your meeting was recorded or transcribed in Teams, open the meeting afterward and go to the Recap tab. Teams gives you AI notes and a suggested task list automatically. Useful, but generic. The better move is to open Copilot inside that recap and ask for what you actually need:

• List only the commitments made by someone other than me, with the person's name and the date they promised.
• What was raised as a risk or a concern, even if we did not resolve it?
• Write a five-line follow-up email to the attendees with the decisions and the owners.

The phrasing matters more than people expect. “Summarize the meeting” gets you a paragraph nobody reads. “List only the commitments made by someone other than me” gets you a list you can act on, because you told it what to leave out.

No Copilot license? You are not stuck. Export or copy the transcript, paste it into ChatGPT, and use the same prompts. You lose the automatic linking back into Teams, and you should strip anything confidential before it leaves your tenant, but the output quality on a plain transcript is close. This is the honest tradeoff I walk through in class: Copilot wins on being inside your data, ChatGPT often wins on the quality of the writing itself.

The gotcha: transcripts mangle names and numbers. If Copilot tells you the figure was $40,000, go find the moment in the recording before you repeat it. Speech-to-text is very good and still occasionally very wrong about exactly the details that matter.

Plenty more on the calendar

If you want the full version of this rather than two tips, I am running a 3-Hour Virtual Seminar on Using ChatGPT and Copilot to be More Productive in Microsoft 365 on Monday, September 7. Three hours, live, and we go through Outlook, Word, Excel, Teams and PowerPoint one at a time — where Copilot actually helps, where it wastes your time, and where ChatGPT does the job better. Bring your own examples; the best questions in these sessions are always the ones people bring from their own inbox.

If that date does not work, the full current schedule is on the front page of PCWebinars.com, and new dates go up as they are confirmed. Register for this one or have a look through the others and find the topic you need.

About your trainer

I’m Tom Fragale. I’ve been a computer trainer and consultant for more than 30 years, and I’ve 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 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.

You can find the full schedule of upcoming live sessions, along with recordings and course material, at PCWebinars.com.