Microsoft 365 Copilot

COURSE CONTENT

1 Day (7 Hours) · Intermediate · In-house at your office or online · 100% HRD Corp claimable programmes

Your organisation is paying for Copilot licences. The common pattern after rollout is that a few people use it for email, everyone else tries it twice, and the licence cost stays on the budget with nothing to show against it.

This programme is built around the thing that changes that: the chain. Copilot is mildly useful inside one application. It earns the licence when the output of one becomes the input of the next without anybody retyping it. Over the day you build one monthly report end to end, starting from a raw Excel export and finishing with a Teams recap, and you time it against how your team does it now.

The day ends on adoption and governance, because that is where most Copilot rollouts fail. You leave with a written rule for what Copilot may touch and who checks its output.

What participants will be able to do

• Explain what Copilot is, how it reads your organisation’s data, and what it cannot see.
• Access Copilot across the Microsoft 365 applications and in the browser.
• Write prompts that produce a usable draft rather than a generic one.
• Draft, rewrite and summarise documents and email threads in Word and Outlook.
• Analyse a data set in Excel, generate formulas, and question what comes back.
• Build a presentation from an existing document in PowerPoint.
• Produce meeting summaries, action items and follow-ups in Teams.
• Set the rules for safe adoption: what Copilot may access and who verifies its output.

Programme outline

Module 1: Introduction to Copilot in Microsoft 365

• What Microsoft 365 Copilot is, and how it differs from a public chat tool
• How it works with Microsoft Graph and your organisation’s own content
• What it can see, and the permissions that decide that
• Accessing Copilot in the desktop apps and on the web
• Copilot Chat against Copilot inside an application
• Prompting basics: how to ask so the answer is usable
• What it is genuinely good at, and where it still disappoints
• The risks that come from it having access to your files

Hands-on activity

• Run your first prompts in Copilot Chat and in one application
• Find out what Copilot can and cannot see from your own account

Module 2: Working Smarter in Word and Outlook

• Drafting letters, reports and proposals in Word from a brief
• Rewriting for tone, length and audience
• Summarising a long document into something a director will read
• Inserting tables and structure without formatting it by hand
• Summarising a long email thread in Outlook
• Drafting replies and follow-ups that sound like you
• Composing clear meeting invitations with the right context
• Editing what comes back, which is always faster than accepting it

Hands-on activity

• Generate a proposal from a short brief and edit it to your standard
• Summarise a long email thread and draft the reply you would send

Module 3: Data Analysis with Copilot in Excel

• Preparing a data set so Copilot can work with it
• Asking Copilot to explain what a table is showing
• Generating formulas, and reading them before you use them
• Highlighting, sorting, filtering and classifying data by prompt
• Producing summaries and visual output
• Building PivotTables and charts by asking rather than clicking
• Spotting where Copilot has misread a column
• Proving a figure against the source before it goes anywhere

Hands-on activity

• Analyse a raw sample data set and produce a summary with a chart
• Find the deliberate error in the sample data that Copilot did not flag

Module 4: Building Presentations in PowerPoint

• Creating a deck from a Word document in one step
• Creating a deck from scratch on a described topic
• Editing slide content and restructuring by prompt
• Improving layout, icons and charts
• Generating speaker notes that match the slides
• Applying your company template so it does not look generic
• Where an AI-built deck still needs a person
• Getting a ten-slide deck to a standard you would present

Hands-on activity

• Build a business presentation from the report you wrote in Module 2
• Rework three slides by prompt and compare against doing it by hand

Module 5: Copilot in Teams and Across Applications

• Meeting summaries, transcripts and action items
• Catching up on a meeting you missed, or joined late
• Drafting agendas and follow-up messages
• Asking what was decided, and who agreed to what
• How Copilot links content across Teams and the other applications
• Building one output that flows from Excel to Word to PowerPoint
• Practical cross-application workflows worth setting up
• Where the chain breaks, and what to do about it

Hands-on activity

• Run a simulated meeting and produce the recap and next steps
• Build the full chain: analyse, write, present, send, recap

Module 6: Adoption, Governance and Next Steps

• Why most Copilot rollouts go quiet after six weeks
• Permissions: Copilot surfaces what a user could already access, faster
• Reviewing what is actually shared across your organisation before rollout
• Deciding which roles get licences first, and why
• Setting the rule for what must still be checked by a person
• Accuracy and accountability when an AI-drafted document is wrong
• Prompts worth standardising across a team
• Measuring whether it saved time, honestly

Hands-on activity

• Draft the Copilot use rules you would put in front of your management
• Build a short prompt set for your own role and share it with the group

What you leave with

You leave having built one complete monthly report across five applications, timed against how your team does it today, with the checking included. You will know which parts of that chain Copilot handles well, which parts it gets wrong, and where a person has to stay in the loop. You will also have a written rule for what Copilot may touch. For the organisation, the licences start paying for themselves and the rollout has something measurable behind it.

Who should attend

• Organisations that have bought Copilot licences and want them used
• Managers and executives who spend most of the day in Microsoft 365
• Finance and operations staff who build recurring reports from Excel exports
• HR and administrative staff drafting documents, minutes and correspondence
• Sales and marketing staff producing proposals, decks and customer communication
• IT and digital teams responsible for rolling Copilot out safely
• Anyone who tried Copilot after the rollout email and quietly stopped using it