Top 10 prompts to try with Microsoft 365 Copilot
What should your staff ask Copilot first? The infographic offers 10 ready-to-use prompts for Outlook, Teams, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and SharePoint. Staff can use them to resolve calendar conflicts, prepare for meetings, and turn data into charts. For practical prompts your staff can use right away, check out the infographic.
How can Copilot help me schedule and manage meetings in Outlook?
Copilot in Outlook can help you schedule and manage meetings more efficiently by handling several common calendar tasks for you:
- Conflict-aware scheduling: You can ask Copilot to “schedule a meeting with [person] in [timeframe] to discuss [topic],” specify your preferred time of day, and ask it to add a meeting room. Copilot will work within your calendar constraints to find suitable options.
- Agenda and series awareness: If you’re unsure about an upcoming meeting, you can say something like, “I think I have a meeting coming up with [person]. What’s on the agenda and when’s the next instance?” Copilot will surface the relevant meeting details from your Outlook calendar.
- Language availability: Calendar scheduling actions in Copilot for Outlook are currently available in Lexical English only, so language settings matter if you want to use these capabilities.
By using natural language prompts, you can offload routine scheduling work to Copilot and focus more on the content of your meetings rather than the logistics.
What can Copilot do in Word, PowerPoint, and Teams for my projects?
Copilot supports a range of project and communication tasks across Word, PowerPoint, and Teams:
- In Word:
- Refine pitches: You can say, “Copilot, I need to practice my sales pitch. I’ll say it out loud, then tell me how I can be more concise.” Copilot will help you tighten your messaging.
- Update status reports: Ask Copilot to “update the document with the latest information from my emails and Teams chat with my manager.” It can keep the existing structure and add a “Key outcomes, Risks, Next steps” section.
- Availability: Copilot in Word is planned to be generally available in January 2026 for Windows desktop, Mac, and web for Microsoft 365 Copilot users (excluding the EU and UK for Word).
- In PowerPoint:
- Executive-ready summaries: You can ask Copilot to “create an executive-ready PowerPoint summarizing the current state of our work in [Project Name]—what’s progressing well, what’s blocked, and what needs attention next.”
- Quarterly focus: For a quarterly product review, you can direct Copilot to focus on key updates from the last quarter so stakeholders see what matters most.
- Rollout details: Copilot in PowerPoint rolled out to Frontier in November 2025 (Windows) and began rolling out to general availability on the web in February (excluding the EU and UK).
- In Teams:
- Prepare for meetings: Use Copilot to develop project updates and draft talking points, for example: “Draft talking points for the unresolved questions in this email based on the feedback from [meeting series].”
- Align with leadership: You can ask Copilot to “brainstorm additional strategies from [meeting] based on what my manager cares about,” helping you reimagine how you respond to leadership priorities.
- Availability: Copilot in Teams is generally available for Microsoft 365 Copilot licensed users on desktop, mobile, and web.
Together, these capabilities help you prepare content, refine messaging, and keep stakeholders aligned without starting from a blank page.
How does Copilot use SharePoint and Excel to organize content and surface insights?
Copilot can help you organize content in SharePoint and analyze data in Excel so you can make more informed decisions.
AI in SharePoint
- Document libraries for projects: You can ask Copilot to “create a document library for program or project assets.” It can set up columns such as asset type, product area, owner, review status, publish date, channel, and region.
- Targeted views: Copilot can create views like “Due this week,” “Waiting on legal,” and “Ready to publish” so teams quickly see what needs attention.
- Licensing and preview: AI in SharePoint requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, and some capabilities may only be available in Public Preview.
- Prompt discovery: For more ideas, you can click “Browse more prompts” below the Copilot Chat prompt box in SharePoint.
Copilot in Excel
- Customer segmentation: With an existing dataset, you can ask Copilot to “analyze the customer data imported from my recent email attachment and group accounts by behavioral similarity using clustering.” Copilot then creates a summary table and charts that highlight the key characteristics of each segment.
- Revenue heatmaps: You can say, “Build a Revenue Heatmap sheet with a pivot table summarizing revenue by Geography and Industry.” Copilot will add a heatmap with conditional formatting color scale, a top-10 table, and a chart to summarize the insights.
- Insight extraction: These features help you move from raw data to visual, decision-ready views without manually building every formula, pivot table, or chart.
By combining SharePoint and Excel capabilities, Copilot helps you rethink how you structure information and surface insights across your content and data.