What Is Microsoft Copilot Used For: The AI Assistant Overview

What Is Copilot on My Computer vs. GitHub Copilot?

Microsoft Copilot is an artificial intelligence assistant powered by the same technology (transformer-based deep learning) that's behind much of the recent AI revolution, so you can think of it as Microsoft's ChatGPT.

There are actually two different Copilots: the one on your computer this article is about and GitHub Copilot, and they're very different in what they actually do.

📌 Copilot on your computer has the ability to help with typical work productivity tasks like writing emails, summarizing documents, creating presentations, and managing your calendar.

To provide highly relevant contextual answers, Copilot takes advantage of your Microsoft 365 data by connecting through Microsoft Graph, which is a secure layer that knows about all your work content across apps.

📌 When you ask Copilot to help with a project update, it can pull information from your actual emails, Teams conversations, and shared documents while respecting your existing permissions, so that you get personalized responses based on your real work context, not generic templates.

💡 Good to know: Microsoft Copilot can also be accessed through any web browser at copilot.microsoft.com. The web version gives you the same AI chat capabilities for general tasks like research, brainstorming, or quick questions, plus some extras like image generation and web search integration.

However, it doesn't see your Microsoft 365 work data (emails, chats, meetings, and files) unless you sign in with a work account that has a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. Without that license, Copilot Chat can only work with files you upload.

GitHub Copilot, on the other hand, was developed by GitHub and OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT), and it's specifically designed to help programmers write code faster by suggesting completions and even entire solutions. Most developers who use GitHub Copilot to automate repetitive tasks access it from Visual Studio Code or some other code editor.

📌 While you can technically ask Microsoft Copilot in, for example, Word a question about software development or GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code a question about project management and get a good answer, you're better off using the right Copilot for the right job – Microsoft's version for office productivity and GitHub's for actual coding work, and we explain how in the next section.

How to Use Microsoft Copilot (Step-by-Step Guide)

Here’s how to access and use Copilot in each app. If you don’t see the Copilot icon, your Microsoft 365 plan may not include it, or your organization may have turned it off.

Word

In Word, Copilot can draft entire documents from scratch based on your prompts, rewrite existing text to match different tones or audiences, and even pull information from other documents you've created. To use it:

1. Launch the Microsoft Word app.
2. In a new blank document, use the Draft with Copilot box, or select the Copilot icon in the left margin of an existing document.
3. Type your request in the "Draft with Copilot" dialog.

Excel

Excel's Copilot can turn natural language requests into formulas, charts, and pivot tables, so you no longer need to be a spreadsheet wizard to identify trends, create forecasts, highlight important data, or simply explain what a complex spreadsheet is showing.

Here's how to get started:

1. Open a workbook saved to OneDrive or SharePoint.
2. Select Copilot on the ribbon, or select a cell and choose the Copilot icon next to it.
3. Type natural language requests like "highlight sales over $10,000 in green."

PowerPoint

PowerPoint Copilot can create an entire presentation complete with appropriate visuals, speaker notes, and design themes based on a Word document. You can also use it to restructure content for different audiences, adjust presentation length, or change the visual style, and you can always start the same way:

1. Start a new presentation in PowerPoint.
2. Select the Copilot icon in the bottom-right corner of the slide.
3. Select Add Content in the chat box, choose Agent Mode, and describe the presentation you want.
4. Answer Copilot’s questions about audience and style (or skip them), review the outline, and ask Copilot to generate the slides.
5. Customize the results by changing themes, adjusting layouts, or adding your own touches.

Outlook

The answer to the question "What is Microsoft Copilot app used for in Outlook?" goes beyond just writing emails. Besides drafting contextually appropriate responses, the AI assistant can summarize lengthy email threads, extract action items and deadlines, or change the tone of your message to a more appropriate one. Here's how to use it:

1. Fire up Outlook on your desktop.
2. Start a new email and select the Copilot icon on the toolbar.
3. Choose Draft to generate a first version, then use the dropdown to change its length or tone. Or choose Coaching by Copilot before sending an important message to get suggestions on tone, clarity, and reader sentiment.

✅ Real-world example: A project manager juggling multiple client accounts can open a 50-email thread and rely on Copilot's automatic summary to quickly understand the main discussion points, decisions made, and outstanding action items.

💡 The same project manager can then use Copilot as AI for Outlook email to quickly draft a response in an appropriate tone.

Teams

Teams’ Copilot is a new colleague who always takes perfect notes and never forgets anything. During meetings, it tracks action items, identifies key decisions, and notes commitments. After meetings, it generates summaries, creates follow-up tasks, and answers questions about discussions. In chat, it's invaluable for catching up on conversations you missed – by default, it looks at the last 30 days of the thread. This is how to use it:

1. Open Teams and navigate to a chat or channel.
2. Select Open Copilot in the upper-right corner of the chat.
3. Choose a prompt like "Summarize what I missed last week" or "List action items."
4. Hit Send and review the result.

In all these apps, Copilot works best when you give it clear, specific input. If your prompt is too vague ("Make this better"), you might end up with something generic. But if you tell it what kind of tone you want, who the audience is, or even what not to include, the results are usually at least usable and sometimes perfect.

📌 You should also keep in mind that even the best AI tools like Copilot can't see everything you do. For example, in Teams, it can't summarize images, Loop components, or files shared in a chat thread. And in Outlook, it summarizes Office and PDF attachments only one at a time, and it can't read encrypted ones.

⚠️ Speaking of emails, Copilot is a great Outlook AI assistant when it comes to writing, but it has almost nothing to offer in terms of inbox management. For example, it won't perform AI email cleanup to make your chaotic inbox more organized. If that's your goal, then you should use a dedicated inbox cleaner like Clean Email (more about it in the last section of this article).

Final Thoughts

Copilot excels at eliminating the tedious parts of knowledge work (the first drafts, the data analysis, the meeting summaries) so you can focus on the creative and strategic thinking that only humans can do. As Microsoft continues to expand how Copilot works across its ecosystem, we're seeing just the beginning of what's possible when AI becomes a natural part of our daily tools.

Of course, AI doesn't eliminate the need for specialized tools as you still need dedicated solutions like Clean Email for specialized tasks. The magic happens when all these tools work together, each doing what it does best. That's when technology stops feeling like a burden and starts feeling like the assistant it was always meant to be.