Updated August 2026 — pricing, licensing, and feature availability for Microsoft 365 Copilot change often; verify current details before acting on anything time-sensitive below.
Most “how to use Copilot” content is written from a demo, not from a real Tuesday: one perfect prompt, one blank document, five seconds of magic. This guide is built differently — around five workflows that hold up in daily use, verified against what actually happened when a UK government agency put Copilot in front of 1,716 real employees for six months, and honest about a separate trial that used the same tool and got a much less impressive result. By the end, you’ll know exactly which license unlocks which capability, how to run each workflow, and what to do differently than the trial that didn’t work.
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Prerequisites
- A Microsoft 365 subscription eligible for Copilot (most business and enterprise plans qualify; check your specific plan’s eligibility before assuming access).
- Know which tier you actually have — this trips up more people than any single feature:
- Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is included at no additional cost with an eligible Microsoft 365 subscription. It gets you AI chat and Copilot inside Outlook, plus metered access to custom agents.
- Microsoft 365 Copilot (the full add-on) costs $30.00 per user per month, billed yearly, on top of your existing Microsoft 365 license. It’s what unlocks Copilot inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams — a separate Teams license is also required for the Teams features.
- No prior AI experience required. Every workflow below uses plain-language prompts, not special syntax.
- A genuine willingness to treat the output as a first draft, not a finished answer — this one habit turns out to matter more than any feature choice; more on why in the Troubleshooting section.
| Tier | Cost | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat | Included with eligible M365 plans | AI chat, Copilot in Outlook, metered custom agents |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot (full) | $30.00/user/month, billed yearly | Everything above, plus Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams; business-data-grounded chat; pre-built agents |
Step 1 — Triage Your Inbox With Two Different Outlook Features
Most people who “tried Copilot once” only tried this step, and only half of it. There are two separate tools here solving two different problems, and using the wrong one for the job is a common early mistake.
For a long thread you’re behind on: open the conversation and look for the “Summary by Copilot” box at the top. Select Summarize, and Copilot scans the whole thread and generates a short summary of the key points — no more scrolling through twenty replies to find the one decision that matters.
For a message you’re about to send that actually matters: compose your draft, select the Copilot icon in the toolbar, and choose Coaching by Copilot. It reviews your message for tone, clarity, and likely reader sentiment, and offers specific suggestions — apply them individually, or use Apply all suggestions to regenerate the draft at once. This is a genuinely different job than autogenerating an email from scratch: it’s a second pair of eyes on something you already wrote.
Step 2 — Catch Up on Meetings You Missed (or Half-Attended)
Teams’ Intelligent Recap pulls from the meeting’s actual transcript, attendance data, and any PowerPoint Live content to surface key topics, decisions, and action items after the meeting ends. One thing worth knowing before you go looking for it: Intelligent Recap requires either Teams Premium or an eligible Microsoft 365 Copilot license — it isn’t included in a base Teams plan, which is a common source of “why can’t I see this” confusion.
A newer capability, video recap, is rolling out for recorded English-language meetings: instead of a bullet-point summary, you get a short AI-narrated highlight reel stitched together from the actual recording — useful when tone and context matter as much as the bullet points themselves.
Step 3 — Turn Spreadsheet Questions Into Formulas Without Memorizing Syntax
In Excel, open the Home tab and select Copilot to open the side pane. Instead of hunting for the right formula, describe what you want in plain language — “add a column showing profit margin” or “show me a summary row for total hours by project” — and Copilot returns a working formula along with an explanation of how it works.
One thing worth flagging here, because an outdated tutorial will get this wrong: Microsoft also built a =COPILOT() worksheet function you could type directly into a cell. It never reached general availability, and Microsoft is retiring it entirely on September 14, 2026, after about a year in preview. If you’ve seen a demo or tutorial showing that function, skip it — the Copilot side pane is the version that’s actually staying.
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Step 4 — Draft and Rewrite Documents Faster in Word
Select any text in a document, choose the Copilot icon in the margin, and select Auto Rewrite. Copilot generates one or more alternate versions in a side pane — adjust the tone (Neutral, Casual, Concise, and similar options) and regenerate until one fits, then choose Replace or Insert to apply it. Treat this as editing help, not first-draft generation: it’s strongest when you already have something down and want it sharper, clearer, or better-toned for the specific reader.
Step 5 — Ask One Question That Spans Multiple Apps
This is the workflow that actually separates someone who tried Copilot once from someone who uses it well, and almost nobody starts here. Instead of manually checking Outlook, then Excel, then Teams, Copilot Chat can answer a single question that spans all three — something like “summarize my last three emails from this client, pull the latest numbers from this spreadsheet, and tell me what’s still open in our Teams channel.” One consolidated answer, instead of three separate app-switches. It requires nothing new to set up — it’s the same Copilot Chat interface, used with a broader question than most people ever think to ask it.
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Troubleshooting
- “I can’t find Copilot in Word/Excel/PowerPoint/Teams.” You likely only have the free Copilot Chat tier, which includes Outlook and general AI chat but not the in-app apps — the full $30/user/month add-on is required for those. Check with your IT administrator about your organization’s specific licensing.
- “An old tutorial shows a
=COPILOT()formula I can type into a cell — mine doesn’t work.” That function never left preview and Microsoft retired it September 14, 2026. Use the Copilot side pane in Excel (Home tab → Copilot) instead. - “Intelligent Recap isn’t showing up after my Teams meeting.” It requires Teams Premium or an eligible Copilot license on top of a base Teams plan — confirm which license you actually have before assuming the feature is broken.
- “The output feels generic or slightly off.” This is usually a grounding problem, not a bug — a vague prompt gets a generic answer. Naming the specific document, thread, or spreadsheet, and stating what you actually need it for, produces sharply better results than a one-line request.
- “It saved me time, but the work doesn’t feel any better.” This is the exact gap between the two UK government trials referenced below — see the next section for what separates a productive rollout from a merely time-saving one.
| Trial | Scope | Time saved | Did quality/output improve? |
|---|---|---|---|
| UK Dept. for Work and Pensions (Oct 2024-Mar 2025) | 1,716 Copilot users vs. 2,535 non-user comparison group | 19 minutes/person/day on routine tasks | Yes — 73% reported higher-quality output; 65% felt more fulfilled |
| UK Dept. for Business and Trade (2025) | ~1,000 staff | Time was saved | Inconsistent — writing tasks improved; slide decks/scheduling had mixed results |
The pattern across both trials: Copilot performed best on searching, drafting, and summarizing — the same three tasks Step 1 through Step 3 above cover — and less reliably on tasks like building slide decks or scheduling from scratch. Microsoft’s own 2026 research backs this up from a different angle: 86% of surveyed AI users say they treat AI output as a starting point, not a finished answer, and stay responsible for checking it — the habit, not the tool, is usually what’s missing when Copilot “doesn’t work.”
Recap & Next Steps
You now know which Copilot tier you actually have, five workflows that hold up under real use — inbox triage, meeting catch-up, spreadsheet formulas, document rewriting, and cross-app questions — and one outdated feature to stop looking for. The single highest-leverage next step: pick the one workflow above you haven’t tried yet, use it on something real this week, and treat the first output as a draft you check, not a finished answer. That one habit is most of the difference between a Copilot license that pays for itself and one that quietly goes unused.
Sources & References
- Microsoft 2026 Work Trend Index Annual Report — https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/agents-human-agency-and-the-opportunity-for-every-organization
- Microsoft 365 Copilot Plans and Pricing (Enterprise) — https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-copilot/pricing/enterprise
- Get email coaching with Copilot in Outlook (Microsoft Support) — https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/copilot-pages/get-email-coaching-with-copilot-in-outlook
- Summarize an email thread with Copilot in Outlook (Microsoft Support) — https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/copilot-pages/summarize-an-email-thread-with-copilot-in-outlook
- Generate formula rows and columns with Copilot in Excel (Microsoft Support) — https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/copilot/generate-formula-rows-and-columns-with-copilot-in-excel
- Turn Copilot formula suggestions on or off in Excel (Microsoft Support) — https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/copilot/copilot-formula-suggestions-turn-on-off
- Rewrite text with Copilot in Word (Microsoft Support) — https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/rewrite-text-with-copilot-in-word-923d9763-f896-4da7-8a3f-5b12c3bfc475
- Recap in Microsoft Teams (Microsoft Support) — https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/recap-in-microsoft-teams-c2e3a0fe-504f-4b2c-bf85-504938f110ef
- An evaluation of DWP’s Microsoft 365 Copilot trial (UK Government, via Computing.co.uk) — https://www.computing.co.uk/news/2026/government/civil-servants-save-19-minutes-day-copilot
- Excel COPILOT function retirement, September 2026 (Office Watch) — https://office-watch.com/2026/excel-copilot-function-removed/