Microsoft has integrated the smart assistant (Copilot) into the (Microsoft 365) suite. In two waysFirst: You will find it included in the company’s most popular office applications, such as: Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, Teams, and other applications to help you be more Creativity, collaboration and productivity.
And the second: you will find it in (Business Chat), an artificial intelligence-supported chat service for companies that will be part of the (Microsoft 365) suite of applications – calendar, emails, chats, documents and meetings – to do things that you were not able to do before, as you can give it natural language prompts Like: “Tell your team how we updated the product strategy,” and it will generate a status update based on morning meetings, emails, and conversation threads.
Therefore, today we will review everything you need to know about the new Copilot smart assistant that Microsoft offers in its office applications group, and how will it change the way we work?
Firstly; What is the Copilot smart assistant?
The new Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps is a generative AI-based chatbot not unlike the one you’re already used to in Bing and the ChatGPT bot.
The assistant (Copilot) is based on the large language model (GPT-4), and it will appear to you in a sidebar within the applications – similar to the Bing Chat shortcut available in the Microsoft Edge browser – where you can use it to ask questions using natural language to perform various tasks, and it can It also appears as a pop-up in the middle of the document while you highlight a paragraph to provide suggestions for writing content or correct grammatical errors with a single click.
secondly; How do you use Copilot in Microsoft applications?
As mentioned earlier, you will find the Copilot assistant in popular Microsoft Office applications, to help you write or summarize content, analyze data, or respond to any inquiry. To use it all you have to do is enter the request you want, and then Copilot will automatically generate the document or respond to your request based on your natural language instructions. Here are some examples of how it works in Microsoft Office applications, as explained by Microsoft:
1- Word:
You can use Copilot in Microsoft Word to create a rough draft of a topic, edit a new document, add content to existing documents, summarize text, rewrite specific sections of a document, or rewrite the entire document to make it more concise. Appropriate writing style (Tone).
2- Excel:
The user no longer needs to master complex formulas in Excel for each column and description in order to get clear and concise statistical data, but you can ask the assistant (Copilot) to write complex formulas and equations, and you can also ask him to analyze the data and create graphs.
Also, using it, you can identify trends, create powerful perceptions, or ask for recommendations to achieve different results. Examples of commands and prompts that can be tested are: “Expect the effect of a change in an equation and create a graph to help visualize this.”
3- PowerPoint:
In PowerPoint, you can ask the Assistant to create presentations on a topic based on your text or Word documents, with the ability to include charts from an Excel file and more.
Microsoft also says you can summarize long presentations; You can request that a 10-slide presentation be reduced to a 5-slide presentation if you feel the presentation is too long. Voice commands can also be used to change layouts and precisely rearrange text and graphics.
4- Outlook:
In addition to quickly replying to routine emails, Copilot can help you organize your inbox, summarize long emails and suggest responses, and adjust email writing style according to its subject matter, which helps finish tasks more quickly and easily.
5- Teams:
You can ask Copilot to summarize the meetings, and it will give you a list of the major decisions that were made and the tasks assigned to each team member. According to Microsoft, users can also ask (Copilot) to specify the advantages and disadvantages of meetings, and the next meeting conversation will be more productive as a result, as unnecessary topics will not be brought up again.
When will Copilot be available in Microsoft applications?
At the present time, the smart assistant (Copilot) is available in (Microsoft 365) applications for specific users and companies, because it is currently in the testing and development stage, as Microsoft said that it is currently testing the smart assistant (Copilot) in Office applications with 20 companies, including 8 companies. in the Fortune 500 list I refused Microsoft is currently advertising for these companies.
She also stated that she will introduce it to more customers in the coming months, and that she will share more details about pricing later.