The Copilot Chat Value With Microsoft 365 Apps

Post 2 of the series: Perception vs Productivity

Completing the picture left open in Post 2

In the last post, we talked about why Copilot can feel underwhelming if you only judge it as a chat tool. ChatGPT often feels better, it talks more, explains more and it feels like it’s doing more. Copilot, especially early on, can feel the opposite. Shorter answers. Less flair. More to the point.

The point is that if you judge Copilot purely on chat behaviour, you miss what makes it even more useful.

So this post is about the bit most people never really explore. What happens when Copilot is used inside the Microsoft 365 apps people already spend their day in.

One quick clarification before we go any further. Copilot Chat and Microsoft 365 Copilot are not the same thing.

Copilot Chat gives you a chat interface, similar to tools like ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude and the ability to work with content you already have open in Microsoft apps. Microsoft 365 Copilot, which is the paid version, goes further and has deeper access across your Microsoft 365 environment.

The reason we mention Microsoft 365 Copilot at all is to show a rounded view of whats available. 

The focus of this post is what we see when using Copilot Chat properly, inside work and why that changes the experience.

Outlook. Email and calendar, the stuff that actually eats your day

Let’s start with Outlook, because this is where most people already feel overloaded.

Emails coming in all day, threads that go on forever. Someone replies to something from weeks ago and suddenly you’re expected to remember the full backstory.

Email

We opened an email and asked Copilot Chat very plain questions. 

What is this about? What am I being asked to do? Is there a deadline hidden in here? Can you help me reply?

The important bit wasn’t the answers themselves. It was the fact that we didn’t have to copy anything, paste anything or explain the context. The email was already open. Copilot could see it. So the conversation stayed focused on the work in front of us.

Instead of reading the same email three times, we got to a clear next step faster. In most cases, straight to a usable reply.

Calendar

Meetings are another place where context gets lost. You have a title, a few attendees, maybe an agenda if you’re lucky. With Copilot Chat, we used it to help understand what the opened meeting was about and what we needed to be prepared for.

It wasn’t doing anything clever. It was just helping connect the dots between what was is in the meeting invitation. That alone can change how prepared you feel going into a meeting.

In Microsoft 365 Copilot (paid version), this goes further because it can look across your whole inbox and calendar at once. That’s additional capability. But even at the Copilot Chat level, working directly inside an opened meeting it was able to gie us context and was helpful.

Word. 

Most people don’t sit down with a blank page every day. They open existing documents that they need to work on, reuse, finish off. For us at Koshima these are often course outlines, proposals or reports. Documents that are almost right, but not quite there.

We took a course overview that we had drafted. It wasn’t bad but it wasn’t landing the way we wanted it to. So instead of rewriting it from scratch, we asked Copilot Chat to work with what was already there.

First, we asked it to summarise the document. That alone was useful, just to sanity-check what the document was actually saying. Then we pushed it a bit further.

We asked Copilot to look at the document from a marketing point of view. How does this read to someone seeing it for the first time? Is the language clear? Does it flow? Would it make someone want to keep reading?

The feedback was practical. It pointed out where things were repetitive, where the message got lost, and where the wording could be simpler.

Next, we asked it to rewrite the document based on those points. This is where it got interesting.

The rewritten version wasn’t longer. It wasn’t more clever. It was just easier to read. The intent came through more clearly, and the structure made more sense for someone scanning it quickly.

Importantly, Copilot Chat didnt edit the existing document (thats a capability that Microsoft 365 Copilot has) but it gave the output as a new downloadable Word document. We didn’t have to move content around or rebuild anything. We just opened the new file and carried on.

We repeated the same process with a different course outline and it behaved the same way again.

That consistency mattered. It meant that it was a repeatable way of improving documents without leaving Word or changing how we work.

Excel. Making sense of the numbers without becoming an Excel expert

Excel was a different kind of test. We opened one of our course exercise spreadsheets with income and expenses with many rows and columns. Instead of manually digging through it, we asked Copilot Chat to help us understand what was actually going on.

We asked questions like: What are the big patterns here? Where is most of the money going? What stands out?

Copilot highlighted trends and patterns that would have taken a while to spot manually. Copilot Chat responded in the chat window and we were able to continue that conversation to dig into the trends that it identified. It was like speaking with a numbers expert.

Then we asked Copilot to add a simple calculator to the workbook. Nothing fancy, just something practical that would normally take a bit of fiddling to set up.

This was interesting as it created a new tab with formulas that worked which meant we could use it straight away. But it didnt do that inside the existing file, it recreated the file with the new tab added. 

If Copilot Chat can help you understand what’s in your spreadsheet and then help you build something useful on top of it, it changes how useable Excel suddenly is without being an expert.

PowerPoint. Making changes without rebuilding the deck

PowerPoint is where things can get painful. An example is when you have a deck that’s already been shared and already been reviewed, maybe tweaked ten times and then someone asks for one more change.

We tested Copilot Chat with that scenario.

Using Copilot Chat, we were able to summarise an existing presentation, pull out the key points, and work together to create content for an additional slide. When we asked it to apply that change, Copilot Chat produced a new version of the presentation with the extra slide included as a downloadable file.

Keep in mind Copilot Chat works on top of the file. 

It helps you reason about the content and generate an updated version, but it does not insert slides directly into the presentation you already have open. This is why it gave a second version of the presentation with the additional slide included rather than inserting a new slide into the existing presentation. 

That on its own is useful. It saves time, avoids starting from scratch and gives you something you can immediately work with.

How does this compare with the paid version Microsoft 365 Copilot?

In one situation we were updating a presentation for a customer on the impact of AI in the logistics sector. We were asked to add specific information about seaports.

We pulled together a short research document, opened the presentation and used Copilot inside PowerPoint to create a summary slide based on that research and insert it directly into the existing deck. The slide appeared in the presentation we were already working on. In the right place. In the same format.

Copilot Chat would create a new file with the old file plus the new slide, Microsoft 365 Copilot would create the new slide inside the existing file. That’s the key distinction.

Copilot Chat helps you work around a presentation. Microsoft 365 Copilot works inside it.

What this starts to show

Across Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint Copilot Chat shows itself as being a useful tool when it’s working on the thing you are working on.

Emails turn into actions faster. Documents get clearer without starting again. Spreadsheets make more sense. Presentations are easier to adjust without rework.

This is where the gap between how Copilot feels in chat and how it works with your existing documents starts to close.

Why a lot of people never see this

Most people only try Copilot once or twice. They open the chat, ask a few questions, compare it to ChatGPT and move on.

If that’s all you see, it’s easy to think Copilot doesn’t offer much.

But the in-app experience is where it starts to earn its place. Yes its possible for ChatGPT to create Word, Excel and Powerpoint files but it doesnt work in the same way Copilot Chat does as you always need to upload, download and work inbetween ChatGPT and the Microsoft Office apps going back and forth.

Key takeaways

• Judging Copilot only as a chat tool misses a big part of the value
• Using it inside Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint reall adds value and speeds up your work 
• You don’t need to change how you work to start seeing value

What comes next

Once AI starts sitting directly inside email, documents, spreadsheets and presentations, a different set of questions shows up.

Questions about responsibility. About trust. About how these tools are being used across an organisation.

That’s what we’ll look at in the next post.

Post 4 will focus on security, trust and compliance and why this conversation can’t be avoided.