Microsoft Office. All the office productivity tools you need.

In this Microsoft Copilot: Your AI Virtual Assistant course, you'll learn how to effectively communicate with Microsoft Copilot to maximise its output. Through hands-on lessons, you will develop your digital research, collaboration, and content creation skills using Copilot.

We will explore the different versions of Copilot, highlighting their capabilities, advantages, and limitations. Utilising Copilot on the Web, you will gain insights to improve writing and communication by instructing the AI to be creative, balanced, or precise. The accuracy of Copilot’s responses improves when you apply recommendations imparted from our expert instructors.

Increased productivity is achieved using Copilot 365 to analyse emails, PowerPoints, and files. The greatest benefits of Copilot 365 are realised when it is used to compose, analyse and summarise content within your applications such as: Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Teams, and more.

Aims

This course aims to introduce you to Microsoft Copilot, an innovative AI tool that assists in creating and managing files, sites and content with ease and efficiency. You will learn how to use Copilot effectively in various situations and contexts, such as writing emails, creating reports, designing presentations, analysing spreadsheets, and collaborating with colleagues. By the end of the course, you will understand how to use Copilot 365 productively to save time within your most-used Microsoft applications.

Outcomes

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• understand the concept, features, benefits, and limitations of Microsoft Copilot
• communicate with Copilot on the Web to request tone and format, seek comparisons and summaries, and perform sentiment analysis, keyword prominence, and topic clustering
• use Copilot Notebook for advanced, tailored, and detailed prompts, ask questions, get help, and revise answers
• use Copilot 365 to compose and analyse content within Microsoft applications, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
• collaborate with Copilot 365 alongside Microsoft tools, such as Teams, Outlook, and SharePoint libraries
• streamline the production of various types of files, such as forms, quizzes, reports, plans, lists, ideas, presentations, and agendas.

Content

What is Microsoft Copilot

• A brief discussion defining Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, and AI tools in general
• When, where, and why to use Copilot
• Comparison of the benefits and limitations of each version of Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT
• A discussion regarding commercial and data protection
• Available addons

Working with your everyday AI companion – Copilot on the Web

• Effective communication to obtain the best results:
  • Initiating a chat conversation style: creative, balanced, precise
  • Directing and requesting a tone when composing
  • Requesting results in a specific format
  • Seeking comparisons in a table
• Summarising websites, intranet pages, and PDFs:
  • Sentiment analysis: highlighting positive, negative, or neutral language
  • Keyword prominence: identify keyword importance
  • Topic clustering grouping related ideas into distinct topics
• Recommendations, tips, and tricks on asking questions, getting help, and revising answers:
  • Improving the accuracy of answers
  • Providing context and background to improve accuracy and relevance
  • Utilising follow-up questions
  • Revising with additional information
• Using Notebook for advanced, tailored, and detailed prompts:
  • Defining a clear goal
  • Specifying expectations such as tone, structure, inclusions, and exclusions
  • Editing and refining prompt iterations
  • Providing step-by-step instructions to guide the generation process
  • Tailoring the tone for the intended audience

Working with your AI assistant at work – Copilot 365

• Word
  • Use ‘prompts’ to reference, retrieve, and gain insights
  • Draft new content: forms and quizzes
  • Reference and analyse related documents to create new reports
  • Summarise, ask questions, and instruct Copilot with commands
• Excel
  • Use ‘prompts’ to reference, retrieve, and gain insights
  • Get suggestions for formulas and charts
• PowerPoint
  • Use ‘prompts’ to reference, retrieve, and gain insights
  • Create new presentations from scratch, or from Word documents and PDFs
  • Format with your organisation’s branding, themes, and templates

Using Copilot to collaborate:

• Teams
  • Meeting assistance
  • Post-meeting recap
  • Document integration
• Outlook
  • Use ‘prompts’ to reference, retrieve, and gain insights
  • Get coaching tips and suggestions on clarity, sentiment, and tone
  • Summarise an email thread
• SharePoint and OneDrive
  • Generate content summaries for files

Intended audience

Anyone interested in using Copilot to improve their productivity and communication would benefit from this course.

Prerequisites

This course assumes little or no knowledge of Copilot. However, you should have a general understanding of personal computers and the Windows operating system environment. If you do not have these skills, we recommend attending Microsoft Office with 365: Essentials before attempting this course.

Delivery modes

• Face-to-face, presenter-taught training in a computer lab
• Online training via the platform Zoom

Face-to-face classes

These classes run in a computer lab, and you do not need to bring your own device.

Online classes

You will need your own device.

Materials

Course materials are shared electronically via Dropbox.