What is Copilot?

Introduction

Copilot is Microsoft 365’s AI assistant, designed to help with everyday office tasks like analysing Excel data, editing Word documents, taking notes in Teams, and designing PowerPoint presentations – making Copilot the ultimate office assistant.

This is a simple guide to understanding what Copilot does, how you can access Copilot, and how it can revolutionise your work life.

Objectives:

• What does Copilot do?
• Is Copilot free?
• How to access Copilot
• Links to ChatGPT?

What does Copilot do?

In short, Copilot is an AI office assistant, but what else can Copilot do for you?

Word:

• Summarise memos
• Write emails
• Write personalised documents based on specific information from Excel, Powerpoint, or different documents
• Editing
• Suggestions on images and layout
• Formatting documents in line with the theme of your brand/business
• Finding relevant images for your document

Excel:

• Suggests new ways to visualise data
• Suggests new analytics on your data
• Create, and then explain, helpful formulae
• Write conclusions on your data

Powerpoint:

• Create presentations based on uploaded documents
• Design templates that fit specific themes
• Add and remove visuals quickly
• Increase the visual appeal of your slides

Teams:

• Recap your meeting at any stage
• Understand how the group feels about a topic based on analysis of their input
• Keep track of unresolved issues and have an updated list

Is Copilot free?

The short answer, yes!

Copilot has a free version that can be accessed on the web via Windows, macOS, and iPadOS. You can also access it on mobile apps for iOS and Android. However, you are offered limited credits for image prompts, summarisation for documents and webpages, support for plugins and Copilot GPTs, and commercial Entra ID data protection.

The slightly longer answer is, it depends what you want to use Copilot for!

Personal use, Microsoft Copilot Pro:

• Faster responses at peak times
• Access Copilot in select Microsoft 365 apps
• Access accelerated AI image creation
• £19.00 per user/month

Businesses, Microsoft 365 Copilot:

• Access Copilot in Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook and Teams
• Access to Business Chat
• Access to Copilot Studio
• Measure the usage and impact of Copilot within your organisation
• £25.94 per user/month

Enterprise and Frontline workers, Microsoft Copilot 365:

• Access Copilot in Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook and Teams
• Access to Business Chat
• Access to Copilot Studio
• Measure the usage and impact of Copilot within your organisation
• Access to Copilot Pages
• £25.94 per user/month

How to access Copilot

To try Copilot you can simply sign into Microsoft Edge and select the Copilot icon in the sidebar, or you can download the Copilot app on your mobile.

For use in your Office 365 apps, you can find Copilot available to you in the Home ribbon tab.

Why not another AI?

What makes Copilot stand out from other AI models is the ability to integrate into the Microsoft 365 apps and work with the user, not just for them. You can upload files to Copilot and they can be summarised or edited for you, your work can be checked and improvements can be given as suggestions, the ability to work alongside the user is something that sets Copilot apart.

At the free tier, Copilot gives users access to the image generation feature, although with limited credits. This is something that other systems, like ChatGPT for example, don’t offer users.

Conclusion

In this article, I set out to explain the many uses of Copilot within the Microsoft 365 Office apps. For more information about pricing, and the uses of Copilot you can access the Microsoft Copilot page here: Microsoft Copilot | Microsoft AI.

I also began to explore how Copilot measures up to different AI assistants, for further reading on this you can check out ChatGPT vs. Copilot: two sides of the same AI coin | Digital Trends.

by Josie Daniel | 12 Dec 24