Table of Contents
Introduction
I have been using Copilot for two weeks and I will share my first impressions and tips with you. This article is part of my blog series documenting my Copilot for Microsoft 365 journey. I am collecting use cases and sharing them with you to help you get started with the tool faster.
Where do I start?
After receiving my Copilot for Microsoft 365 license, my first question was how to access its functionalities. It is important to note that Copilot is not immediately available after license assignment. Integration with your web applications may take a few days. Therefore, my advice for starting with Copilot for Microsoft 365 is to aim to use it with web applications initially.
After about a week, the Copilot icon appeared in most of the regular Office apps. However, it is not visible in normal Outlook, only in New Outlook or the web application. Since I switched to New Outlook six months ago, this was not an issue for me, but it may be for you.
Access Copilot for Microsoft 365
It is important to differentiate between the Copilot products. On one hand, we have ‘Copilot,’ formerly known as Bing Chat, which is the publicly available version that does not integrate with your Microsoft 365 apps and has no access to your data. When you don’t have a Copilot for Microsoft 365 license, you can only access the normal Copilot.
When you have the license assigned, you can access both versions of Copilot in your Edge browser. You can switch between them at the top of the sidebar. ‘Work (Arbeit)’ refers to Copilot for Microsoft 365, and ‘Web’ refers to ‘Copilot’ (formerly known as Bing Chat).

Or you can access Copliot by browsing https://copilot.microsoft.com
You can switch between both versions at the top of the page:

The third option that I find most accessible in my daily work is accessing Copilot for Microsoft 365 from New Teams:

Drafting in Outlook
One use case I heard about in a podcast is the drafting functionality in Outlook.

Drafting creates an email draft for you. You can either compose a new email or reply to an existing conversation. You have the option to set the tone and length of the message. I typically choose the default ‘direct’ tone and switch to the ‘medium’ length, as the short version omits the usual email greetings and farewells.

Here is the prompt I used to create a draft of an email:

This is the result:


Since I did not create a contact for the recipient’s address, Copilot is unable to call them. However, in a conversation, Copilot can extract the correct recipient information.
Conclusion
I frequently use the drafting functionality to create the first draft of my emails, which I then adjust as needed. This tool makes my email writing more efficient.
In future articles, I will cover additional findings as I aim to write shorter articles.
Thank you for reading!