Outlook is where people start. Excel and Word are where Copilot starts paying for itself — with a couple of rules about what to trust.
Excel
- Ask questions of a table. Format the data as a table (Ctrl+T), then: "Which five customers had the largest drop in orders from Q1 to Q2?" It adds a column, a formula or a summary, and explains what it did.
- Explain a formula you inherited. Select the cell and ask what it does. Genuinely useful on spreadsheets built by someone who has left.
- Suggest a chart. "Show sales by region as a chart" — then adjust.
- Clean up. "Highlight duplicates", "split this column into first and last name", "flag values outside the expected range".
Limit: Copilot works best on well-structured tables in files saved to OneDrive or SharePoint. Check every formula it writes the first time; it is right most of the time, and "most" is not "all".
Word
- Draft from bullet points. Type five bullets, ask for a first draft of a proposal section, then edit.
- Rewrite for a different reader. Select a paragraph: "make this plainer for a non-technical reader" or "make this more formal".
- Summarise a long document. A 40-page vendor agreement becomes a one-page summary with page references — a starting point, not a legal opinion.
- Turn it into slides. From PowerPoint, "create a presentation from this document" produces a reasonable draft deck.
The rule for both
Copilot produces drafts, not decisions. Numbers, dates, prices and commitments are checked by a person before they go anywhere. Used that way — on files in a tidy, well-permissioned tenant — it takes the blank-page problem off the table for good.
