Microsoft Copilot can now organise your Outlook, build better PowerPoint decks and more

Microsoft recently hosted its Copilot Wave 2 event and brought forth a bunch of cool AI upgrades for business professionals and students alike. Among the announcements, the brand spoke about automated agents as well as extended capabilities for the Copilot assistant.

Keeping the growing need for better organisation and productivity in mind, the new Copilot features aim to improve collaboration between more than one worker in a company.

Copilot for Microsoft 365: What's new?

Microsoft announced its plans to expand the reach of its generative AI assistant to all its applications eventually. The brand went on to talk about several artificial intelligence-driven changes that will now be seen in Microsoft Office apps, including Excel, PowerPoint, as well as Outlook.

Microsoft Excel: Copilot on Excel will soon allow users to use its AI capabilities for functions such as data visualisation, Conditional Formatting and more. It will additionally let users perform advanced analysis on their spreadsheet data. It has also added Copilot support for formulae, such as XLOOKUP and SUMIF, along with the ability to produce more charts and pivot tables.

Apart from that, Microsoft declared its integration with Python for advanced tasks, such as risk analysis, forecasting and more.

ALSO READ: How to export Copilot conversations into Word, PDF and texts

Microsoft PowerPoint: New features for Microsoft PowerPoint include an improved narrative builder, which can help users create a first draft of their deck. The AI assistant will also be able to incorporate your company’s branded template or pre-approved images from Sharepoint to create a first draft for you.

Microsoft Word: Copilot will now let you fetch reference data from emails, as well as talking points from a meeting, into a document. Microsoft also plans to add Copilot support to OneDrive, making it easier for users to summarise and compare up to five files on their drive.

Microsoft Outlook: Microsoft has incorporated AI assistance for Outlook that will help users organise their mailbox better. The mail and messaging service will also get a ‘prioritise my inbox’ button which allows Copilot to automatically prioritise important emails.

ALSO READ: How to use Google AI Studio with Microsoft Excel 365

Microsoft Teams: Copilot for Teams, on the other hand, will now be able to summarise chat, as well as meeting conversations within the smartphone or laptop app.

Copilot Pages: Lastly, Microsoft at its event, introduced Copilot Pages, which will automate certain tasks and pull insights from your work data into an editable document. Pages will make it simpler to work together with a colleague and use Copilot as a ‘partner’ for brainstorming ideas.

Further, the document will also be easy to access with a shareable link.

Will the new Copilot features for Microsoft Office be available for everyone?

The new Copilot features will soon begin rolling out for everyone. However, Microsoft Copilot 365 is priced at $30 per user per month and will only be available to those with an active Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, or Business Premium license.

The Copilot tier was primarily introduced to encourage businesses to sign up; however, doing so will also require companies to put their faith in the AI assistant’s capabilities as well as output.

Several believe that fact-checking the assistant’s answers may also make the addition redundant when considering long-term usage. That said, it is safe to say that the reception and reviews will largely depend upon the initial feedback.