Course Information

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 and master its use to simplify complex tasks, create your own AI agent, and share work and data efficiently using AI. 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.

Finally, we will teach you how to use Copilot to clean data, create functions, and leverage the innovative capabilities of the AI-driven app, Copilot Loop. You'll also learn to create and deploy your own AI specialist, known as a Copilot Agent.

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, cleaning data and collaborating with colleagues. Additionally, we will show you how to use Copilot to create functions in Excel, leverage the capabilities of the new AI-driven app—Copilot Loop, and develop your own AI specialist, the Copilot Agent.

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
• harness the power of Copilot Loop for seamless collaboration and dynamic content updates
• 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

• An introduction of what is GenAI, Large Language Model (LLM) and Natural language processing (NLP)
• 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:
  • Improving the accuracy of answers
  • Providing context and background to improve accuracy and relevance
  • Utilising follow-up questions
  • Revising with additional information
• 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
• An introduction to Loop pages and Copilot Page:
  • What are Loop pages?
  • Draft and add content with Microsoft 365 Copilot in Loop
  • Recap changes in Loop with Copilot
  • Summarise a page with Copilot in Loop
  • How Loop is integrated with Copilot Chat

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
  • Use Copilot to clean, format and transform data
  • Create complex formulas using copilot
• 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
• OneDrive
  • Generate content summaries for files
  • Compare files
• SharePoint
  • Create a Copilot agent in SharePoint
  • Write with Copilot in SharePoint rich text editor

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.