How to Use Copilot in Word: Step-by-Step (Real Prompts)

How to Use Copilot in Word: A Step-by-Step Guide (with Real Prompts)

To use Copilot in Word, open the Home tab on the ribbon, click the Copilot icon, type a clear prompt such as “Write a one-page project update for senior management,” and select Generate. Choose Keep it, Regenerate, or Discard. You can also highlight text you already have and ask Copilot to rewrite, shorten, summarise, or change the tone. One thing to know up front: Copilot is not free. It needs a paid Microsoft 365 Copilot or Copilot Pro licence before the icon will even show up in your Word.

I have been training working professionals on Microsoft Office for 24 years here in Singapore, and Copilot in Word is the single biggest change I have seen to how people draft a document at work. Reports that used to take an afternoon now take 20 minutes. But only if you ask the right way. This guide walks you through every common Copilot task in Word — drafting, rewriting, summarising, formatting, and comparing documents — with real prompts you can copy. Mac, Word for the web, and the troubleshooting steps are all here too.

What is Copilot in Word

Copilot in Word is the AI assistant built into Microsoft Word. It reads what is in your document, understands what you are trying to say, and then helps you write, edit, summarise, or restructure the text. You talk to it in plain English. There is no special syntax to learn, no formula, no macro. Just type what you want.

Think of it like having a junior colleague on your shoulder who has read a lot of business writing but does not yet know your company. You will still need to direct the work and check the output. But the time it saves on the boring 70 percent of the writing (the first draft, the rewrite, the summary) is enormous.

Copilot behaves slightly differently in each Microsoft 365 app. In Excel, it works on numbers, formulas, and data analysis — see our companion guide on using Copilot in Excel for data analysis. In Outlook, it focuses on email drafting and meeting recaps (covered in Copilot in Outlook for inbox triage). In Word, it focuses on prose: words, sentences, paragraphs, tone, and structure. Same Copilot licence, different jobs in each app.

Inside Word specifically, Copilot does four broad things well: draft new content from a short prompt, rewrite or edit text you already have, summarise a long document, and reformat content into tables, bullet lists, or headings. It is also useful for comparing two documents and for pulling action items out of meeting notes. The rest of this guide shows you how, one task at a time.

How to enable Copilot in Word (Microsoft 365 + Copilot Pro licensing)

First, the question I get most often in the training room: how come my colleague has Copilot in her Word, and I do not?

The answer is almost always the licence. Copilot in Word is not part of the standard Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, or Business plan. The Copilot button is like the velvet rope at a club. The Word app is the club. The Copilot button only appears once you have paid the cover charge. The cover charge is one of these:

• Copilot Pro — a paid consumer add-on for Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscribers
• Microsoft 365 Copilot — a paid business add-on attached to Microsoft 365 Business Standard, Business Premium, E3, or E5
• A qualifying enterprise agreement that includes the Microsoft 365 Copilot SKU

If you are not sure which plan your company is on, ask your IT administrator or the Microsoft 365 admin who looks after your tenant. The free Copilot Chat product at copilot.microsoft.com is a different thing entirely. Useful, but it does not put a Copilot icon inside your Word document. (Microsoft’s own official Copilot in Word documentation lists the supported plans in detail.)

Once the licence is in place, three more things need to be true:

1. Word is up to date. Go to File > Account > Update Options > Update Now. Older versions of Word do not have the Copilot integration.
2. Connected experiences are enabled. Go to File > Options > Privacy and turn on both of these toggles: “Experiences that analyze content,” along with “Other connected experiences.” Copilot reads your document content through these connections.
3. The file is saved in OneDrive or SharePoint. Copilot will not work properly on a local-only .docx in some configurations. Save the document to your cloud storage first.

When all that is done, you can open Copilot in three ways:

• Ribbon icon — open any document and click the Copilot icon at the right end of the Home tab
• Draft with Copilot panel — on a new blank document, a pen-shaped Copilot icon appears in the page itself; click it, or press Alt + I (Option + I on Mac), and the prompt box opens
• Slash command — start typing a / anywhere in the document; Word offers Copilot suggestions in line

If the Copilot icon still refuses to appear after all of this, the licence is the usual culprit. The second most common cause is that the document is in the older .doc format. Save it as .docx and try again.

How to draft a new Word document with Copilot

Drafting from a prompt is the use case most people start with, and it is the one that will give you back the most time. The flow is six steps:

1. Open a new blank Word document. A pen-shaped Copilot icon sits in the page itself, labelled Draft with Copilot.
2. Click the icon (or press Alt + I). A prompt box opens at the cursor position.
3. Type a clear, specific prompt. The more specific you are, the better the draft.
4. Select Generate (or press Enter). Copilot processes the prompt and writes the draft directly in the document.
5. Review the draft and choose Keep it, Regenerate, or Discard. Keep inserts it. Regenerate gives you a different version. Discard removes it.
6. Refine the draft. In the same prompt box, type something like “Make it shorter and more direct” or “Add a bullet list of three action items at the end.” Copilot updates the draft in place.

Here is where most people fumble. A vague prompt like “Write something about productivity” is like ordering “food” at a hawker centre — you get something, but it probably is not what you wanted. A specific prompt like “Write a 200-word internal memo to the operations team announcing a new expense approval policy, friendly tone, signed by the COO” is like ordering “chicken rice, no chilli, extra cucumber, takeaway” — the staff knows exactly what to give you. The clarity of the prompt is the single biggest lever you have on the quality of the output.

You can also point Copilot at existing files as references. In the prompt box, type a / and start typing a filename. Copilot lists matching files from your OneDrive and SharePoint. Attach up to three reference files on Copilot Pro, or up to twenty on Microsoft 365 Copilot for business. References make the draft far more accurate, because Copilot uses the actual content of those files instead of generic phrasing — like showing the cook your favourite version of the recipe before he starts cooking.

How to rewrite, shorten, or change the tone of existing text

Once you have a draft, the editing job begins. Copilot is good at this, often better than at drafting from scratch, because it has real text to work with instead of a blank page.

The flow is the same in every case:

1. Select the text you want to change — a paragraph, a list, a table, or a single sentence.
2. Right-click and choose Copilot from the context menu. Or click the Copilot icon in the left margin that appears next to your selection.
3. Pick Rewrite, Visualize as a table, or Refine. Or type a custom instruction in the Copilot pane.

Useful refine commands include “Make this more concise,” “Rewrite this in a more formal tone,” “Shorten this by 30 percent,” “Remove the jargon,” “Make this sound like it was written by a person, not a corporate brochure,” and “Rewrite this for a non-technical reader.” Copilot returns a suggestion. Keep, regenerate, or discard.

A trick worth knowing. When an entire section feels wrong, do not rewrite sentence by sentence. Select the whole H2 (heading plus prose), right-click, choose Copilot, and ask it to “Rewrite this section for a senior management audience.” The structural rewrite is usually more useful, because Copilot keeps the meaning while changing the order and emphasis. Your boss reads the first sentence of each paragraph. Make sure the right thing is in there.

How to summarise a Word document with Copilot

Summarising a long document is one of the highest-value uses of Copilot in Word, and one of the simplest.

Open the document. Open the Copilot pane from the ribbon. In the prompt box, type one of these:

• Summarise this document in five bullet points
• List the key takeaways from this report
• Summarise the main argument of this document in three sentences
• Pull out every action item assigned to a person, with the person’s name next to each

Copilot reads the whole file and returns the summary in the pane. For a single document, the practical upper limit is around 1.5 million words, which is roughly 300 pages. Beyond that, Copilot may truncate or summarise only the first part.

For very long documents, the cleaner result usually comes from summarising section by section. Select the section, right-click, choose Copilot, and ask for a short summary. Repeat for each section. You will get a more accurate set of summaries than asking Copilot to handle the entire document at once.

Always read the summary before sharing it. Copilot can miss nuance, especially in technical, legal, or contractual documents where a single sentence can carry significant weight. Treat the summary as a first draft, not the final thing. Your boss can tell when you have not actually read the report.

How to format a Word document with Copilot

Formatting is the under-documented strength of Copilot in Word. It can convert prose into structured layouts much faster than doing it by hand.

Prompts that work well:

• “Convert this paragraph into a numbered list of steps.”
• “Turn this list into a comparison table with three columns: feature, advantage, limitation.”
• “Generate a table of contents based on the headings in this document.”
• “Reorganise this document into the following sections: background, options considered, recommendation, next steps.”
• “Add H2 headings to break this long paragraph into three sections.”

The pattern is always the same. Select the content you want to restructure. Open the Copilot pane. Give the formatting instruction in plain English. Review the result.

Two limitations worth knowing. Copilot does not always preserve the exact visual styling of your document. Fonts, colours, or table borders may reset to defaults, and you may need to apply your house style afterwards. And complex multi-page tables sometimes split across pages awkwardly; a small manual touch-up at the end is usually needed.

How to compare two Word documents with Copilot

This is the use case almost no competitor tutorial covers, even though it is one of the most useful things Copilot can do in Word. (For the slide-deck equivalent, see our walk-through on using Copilot in PowerPoint to compare versions of a deck.)

Step-by-step:

1. Open the first document in Word.
2. Open the Copilot pane from the ribbon.
3. Reference the second document by typing / and selecting it from the file list. Or use the Reference a file button if it is visible.
4. Ask Copilot to compare them. Useful prompts:
   • “Compare this document with /report-v2.docx and list the major differences.”
   • “What has changed between this document and /proposal-original.docx? Group the changes by section.”
   • “Find the contradictions between this document and /policy-2024.docx.”
   • “Summarise the differences in tone and emphasis between this document and /draft-from-finance.docx.”

Copilot returns a written comparison in the pane. This is not the same as Word’s built-in Compare feature on the Review tab, which produces a track-changes view of every literal text difference. The Copilot comparison is more like asking a colleague to tell you what changed, not which commas moved. For most business reviewers, the Copilot version is more useful, and considerably faster.

The standard caveats apply. Read both original documents before acting on the comparison. And remember the three-file limit on Copilot Pro, twenty on Microsoft 365 Copilot. You can compare more than two documents in a single prompt if you need to.

Copilot in Word on Mac and Word for the web

Copilot in Word on Mac works the same as on Windows, with one or two small differences:

• The Copilot icon is in the same position on the Home tab in the ribbon
• The keyboard shortcut to open Draft with Copilot is Option + I (the Mac equivalent of Alt + I on Windows)
• The right-click menu reads the same: Copilot > Rewrite / Refine / Visualize as table
• You still need a Microsoft 365 Copilot or Copilot Pro licence — there is no Mac-only free tier

Word for the web, the browser version of Word at office.com, also supports Copilot for licensed users. The interface is slightly more compact. The Copilot pane opens as a sidebar instead of a panel, but the prompts and commands are identical. This is fantastic if you are on a Chromebook, a Linux machine, or any device where you cannot install desktop Word.

One thing that does not yet work the same. The slash command for referencing files is sometimes restricted in Word for the web, depending on your tenant. If a /filename reference does not work in the browser, fall back to using the Reference a file button.

Real-world Word and Copilot prompts you can copy

The difference between a fantastic Copilot session and a frustrating one is almost always the prompt. After 24 years of training Microsoft Office in Singapore, I see one pattern repeatedly: people who write vague prompts blame the AI for vague output. The prompt is where the work happens. Below are prompts grouped by job. Copy the one closest to your task and adjust the specifics.

Drafting from scratch:

• “Write a 250-word internal memo announcing that the office will be closed on Friday for a public holiday, friendly tone, signed by the HR manager.”
• “Draft a one-page project status update for senior management on the customer-portal redesign project. Include progress, risks, and the next two milestones.”
• “Write a thank-you note to a client after a successful training programme delivery. Two short paragraphs, warm but professional.”
• “Draft a one-page proposal for an in-house training programme on Microsoft 365 Copilot, addressed to an L&D manager, including learning outcomes and a suggested two-day format suitable for WSQ submission.”

Rewriting and refining:

• “Rewrite this paragraph to be 30 percent shorter and easier for a non-technical reader.”
• “Change the tone of this email from formal to warm and conversational, without losing the meaning.”
• “Remove the jargon and replace it with plain English.”
• “Rewrite this section so the most important point sits in the first sentence.”

Summarising:

• “Summarise this document in five bullet points for someone who has only ninety seconds to read it.”
• “Pull out every action item in this document along with the person responsible and the deadline.”
• “List the key risks identified in this report and rank them from highest to lowest.”

Formatting:

• “Turn the list above into a three-column comparison table: option, pros, cons.”
• “Add headings to this document based on the natural sections in the prose.”
• “Generate a table of contents using the existing heading hierarchy.”

Performance review use case:

• “Draft a fair, balanced performance review for a senior analyst who exceeded targets on data analysis (top quartile) but missed deadlines on two project deliverables. Two paragraphs, plus three specific development actions.”

Comparing two documents:

• “Compare this document with /q3-report.docx. List the three biggest differences in conclusions.”
• “What has changed in tone between this document and /v1-draft.docx?”

For a structured walkthrough of these prompts and many more, done live on real A4-sized documents in a Singapore classroom, our in-person course on Copilot for Microsoft 365 covers each use case with a worked example, the live ribbon, and a take-home prompt library you can use the next day.

If your team also wants to move beyond single-document use and into automated, multi-app Copilot workflows, see our companion course on building agentic AI automations without coding.

Common mistakes and troubleshooting

A short list of the issues that actually slow people down in real Copilot sessions, with the fix for each.

Copilot button is missing. The licence is the most common cause. Check that your Microsoft 365 plan includes Copilot, or that you have a Copilot Pro subscription attached to your account. Second most common: Word is out of date. Update it. Third: the file is in the older .doc format. Save it as .docx and reopen.

Copilot button is grayed out. Usually the file format. Convert .doc to .docx through File > Save As. If the file is in a Protected View (the yellow bar at the top), click Enable Editing.

Slow response, or Copilot times out. The document is probably too large, or the prompt is too complex. Work on smaller sections, one at a time. Use shorter, more specific prompts. If you are summarising, try a 30-page chunk before attempting 300 pages.

Copilot returns inaccurate or hallucinated content. Copilot generates text based on patterns. It can confidently produce statements that sound right but are wrong — especially for numbers, names, dates, and citations. Always verify factual claims against a trusted source before sharing the document. For technical and regulatory content, treat Copilot output as a first draft only. Of course your boss will be unhappy if you forward a confident-sounding paragraph that turns out to be invented.

Output sounds generic or robotic. Add more constraints to the prompt. Specify the audience, the tone, the length, and the desired structure. Provide a reference file with the right tone if you have one. The single biggest lever on quality is the specificity of the prompt.

The Copilot pane keeps forgetting what we discussed. Copilot has a limited memory across turns in a single session. For complex tasks, restate the context in each prompt rather than relying on the previous turn. If accurate context matters, attach a reference file instead. Correct & Complete context make a huge difference in the quality of results you receive from Copilot.

If you want a structured way to learn these workflows and to build a tested prompt library for your own role, our Digital Transformation with AI Tools course covers Copilot across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams in a single programme.

Closing

You now know how to use Copilot in Word for every common task: drafting, rewriting, summarising, formatting, and comparing documents. The two biggest determinants of a good session are a clear, specific prompt and an active licence. Everything else is practice.

Do try it out today. Pick a real document on your desk (a report, a memo, an email draft) and ask Copilot to either rewrite it, shorten it, or summarise it. Compare what comes back with what you would have written by hand. Repeat the experiment three or four times on three or four different documents this week, and you will quickly build an instinct for which jobs to hand to Copilot and which to keep for yourself.

I hope this guide has been useful. Give it a try, and let me know how it goes.