How to Use Microsoft 365 Copilot: A Beginner’s Guide (2026) | Intellisoft Singapore

How to Use Microsoft 365 Copilot: A Beginner’s Guide

To use Microsoft 365 Copilot, open one of the Office apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Teams), click the Copilot icon, and type a plain-English prompt such as “Summarise this document in five bullet points.” Copilot reads your content and does the work. The catch: the in-app Copilot needs a paid Microsoft 365 Copilot or Copilot Pro licence, so it is not part of the standard plan.

This is the overview guide. I will explain what Microsoft 365 Copilot actually is, and which of the several “Copilots” you are dealing with, because that confuses almost everyone. Then how to get started, what it costs, how to use it inside each app, how to write prompts that work, and how to use it well at work without getting burned. For the deep, step-by-step walkthrough of each app, there are separate guides linked along the way.

What is Microsoft 365 Copilot?

Microsoft 365 Copilot is the artificial intelligence assistant built into the Microsoft Office apps. It uses a large language model to read what is on your screen, understand a request you make in ordinary English, and then write, edit, summarise, analyse, or restructure your work. There is no special command to learn. You ask. It does.

The confusing part is that Microsoft has put the “Copilot” name on several different products, and most people use the word to mean all of them at once. It helps to separate them:

• Microsoft 365 Copilot — the paid assistant inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. It is grounded in your own files, emails, and meetings. This is the one this guide is about.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat — a free chat assistant you reach through a browser or Teams. It answers questions and drafts text, but it does not reach into your documents.
• Windows Copilot — the assistant built into Windows 11 for system tasks and general questions.
• GitHub Copilot — a separate product for software developers that writes code inside programming tools. It has nothing to do with the Office apps, even though it shares the name.

Here is a simple way to picture it. Think of one capable assistant who follows you from room to room in your office. In the writing room (Word) they help you draft. In the numbers room (Excel) they read your data. In the meeting room (Teams) they take notes. Same assistant, different job in each room, because the room decides the work. That is Microsoft 365 Copilot. When a colleague asks “have you tried Copilot,” this is almost always the one they mean.

The reason it feels different from an ordinary chatbot is grounding. A general AI tool knows a great deal about the world but nothing about your Tuesday. Microsoft 365 Copilot can see your last email thread, the spreadsheet you opened this morning, and the meeting you missed, and it can use that context to do real work, all within the permissions you already have. How good is that?

How to get started with Copilot (and what you need first)

Getting started is genuinely quick once the licence is sorted. Here is the order that works:

1. Check that you have a Copilot licence. This is the step most people skip, and it is the reason the Copilot icon “isn’t showing up” for them. The in-app Copilot is a paid add-on (more on cost in the next section). If your organisation has not assigned you a licence, no amount of clicking will make the button appear.
2. Update your Office apps. Copilot features ship almost every month, and an out-of-date app may not show them. Open any Office app, go to Account, and run the update check.
3. Sign in with the right account. Use the work or school account that holds the Copilot licence, not the personal account you happen to also be signed into. Mixing accounts is a very common reason Copilot quietly disappears.
4. Find the Copilot icon. In most apps it sits on the Home tab of the ribbon, usually at the right-hand end, and it opens a side pane.
5. Type your first prompt. Start with something low-stakes. In Word, try “Write a short paragraph introducing our team to a new client.” Read what comes back, then ask for changes.

That is the whole loop. Open the app, click Copilot, type a request, read the result, refine. Everything else in this guide is the same loop applied to different kinds of work.

Is Copilot free? Licensing, Copilot Chat vs the paid add-on

This is the question that trips up almost everyone, and most guides skate right past it. The honest answer has two halves.

There is a free Copilot, but it is the limited one. Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is free with a Microsoft account. You open it in a browser or in Teams, chat with it, ask questions, and have it draft text for you. It is a capable assistant. What it cannot do is reach inside your Word document, analyse the spreadsheet you have open, or summarise the specific meeting you attended. It is a chat window, not an in-app colleague.

The in-app Copilot is paid. To get Copilot working inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams, with access to your own files and emails, you need one of two paid licences:

• Microsoft 365 Copilot — the business add-on. It attaches to a qualifying business or enterprise Microsoft 365 plan (for example Business Standard, Business Premium, or an enterprise E3 or E5 plan) and is billed per user per month. This is what most companies roll out.
• Copilot Pro — the consumer add-on. It pairs with Microsoft 365 Personal or Family, for individuals who want Copilot inside their own Office apps.

So the practical rule is simple. If you want to chat with Copilot, you can do that for free. If you want Copilot to do work inside your documents, someone has to pay for a licence. When a colleague says “Copilot doesn’t work for me,” it is almost always because they have the free chat but not the paid in-app licence. No mystery, just the licence. Microsoft’s own Microsoft 365 Copilot plan and pricing page lists which plans qualify for the add-on.

How to use Copilot in each Microsoft 365 app

Copilot does a different job in each app, because each app handles a different kind of work. Here is the short version of each, with one example prompt and a link to the full step-by-step guide.

Copilot in Word

In Word, Copilot is about prose: drafting from a brief, rewriting text, changing the tone, summarising a long document, and tidying content into tables and headings. Open the Copilot pane, or highlight some text and ask for a change. Our full walkthrough on drafting and rewriting documents with Copilot in Word covers every task with real prompts.

Example prompt: “Draft a one-page project update for senior management, plain language, with a short risks section at the end.”

Copilot in Excel

In Excel, Copilot is about data: explaining formulas, writing formulas from a plain-English request, building charts, spotting trends, and creating PivotTables. Your data needs to be in a proper table for Copilot to work with it reliably. For the step-by-step version, see using Copilot in Excel for data analysis.

Example prompt: “Show total sales by region for the last six months and add a column for percentage growth.”

Copilot in PowerPoint

In PowerPoint, Copilot is about slides: turning a Word document or a prompt into a draft deck, writing speaker notes, restructuring a presentation, and suggesting layouts and images.

Example prompt: “Create a six-slide presentation introducing our new onboarding process to new hires.”

Copilot in Outlook

In Outlook, Copilot is about email and time: drafting and rewriting messages, summarising a long thread, adjusting tone, and pulling the action items out of the pile in your inbox.

Example prompt: “Summarise this email thread and list what I have been asked to do, with deadlines.”

Copilot in Teams

In Teams, Copilot is about meetings: live and after-the-fact summaries, action items, decisions made, and catching you up when you join late or miss a meeting entirely. Managers love this one, because nobody enjoys writing up minutes. Our guide on using Copilot in Teams for meeting summaries shows the live and recap flows in detail.

Example prompt: “Summarise the key decisions and assign owners to each action item from this meeting.”

How to write good Copilot prompts

The single biggest difference between people who find Copilot useful and people who find it disappointing is the prompt. A vague prompt gives you a vague answer. A clear prompt gives you something you can actually use.

A reliable structure has three parts: task, context, and format.

• Task — what you want done. “Draft an email.” “Summarise this.” “Build a chart.”
• Context — who it is for and why. “for a supplier who is late.” “for a non-technical board.” “for new hires in their first week.”
• Format — the shape of the answer. “Under 120 words.” “As a five-row table.” “Bullet points, friendly tone.”

Compare these two prompts:

The second column gives Copilot enough to get it right on the first try. The first column guarantees a few rounds of back-and-forth.

You do not need a perfect prompt every time. Copilot is a conversation, not a vending machine. Start roughly, read the first answer, then tell it what to fix: “make it shorter,” “more formal,” “add a line about the budget.” Each turn gets you closer.

How to use Copilot effectively at work

Knowing how to click the button is not the same as getting value from it. After 24 years of training in Singapore, I see one pattern again and again: people learn the feature, attend the demo, nod along, and then go back to their desk and never use it. Singapore professionals tend to be over-trained on theory and under-trained on application. Copilot is no different. A few habits separate the teams that quietly fold it into their week from the ones who try it once and forget.

Start with the boring, repetitive jobs. The best first use cases are not the flashy ones. They are the tedious ones you do every week: summarising a long thread, turning meeting notes into action items, drafting the first version of a status update. These are low-risk and high-frequency, which is exactly where the saved minutes add up to real hours.

Always read the output. Copilot can be confidently wrong. It can invent a figure, misread a table, or soften an email past the point you intended. Treat every result as a strong first draft from a fast junior colleague, not as a finished product. The check is not optional, especially for anything with numbers, names, or commitments in it. Your boss will not accept “but Copilot wrote it.”

Build a shared prompt library. Once someone on the team finds a prompt that produces a great weekly report, save it and share it. A short list of proven prompts in a shared OneNote or Teams channel turns one person’s good result into the whole team’s default. This is the habit that turns Copilot from a novelty into something the team actually relies on.

Know when not to use it. For a genuinely sensitive judgement call, legally binding wording, or anything where being wrong is expensive, Copilot drafts and you decide. It is a productivity tool, not a decision-maker.

For Singapore teams there is a practical angle too. AI adoption is moving quickly here, and structured upskilling is well supported, including WSQ-funded and SkillsFuture-friendly training. That makes it realistic to bring a whole team up to a common standard, rather than leaving each person to puzzle Copilot out alone at their desk. Over 24 years we have trained more than 48,000 working professionals across Singapore, and the teams that improve fastest are always the ones that practise together, not the ones who watch one demo and hope. If your roadmap goes beyond single prompts into automated, multi-app workflows, our course on building agentic AI automations without coding picks up where this guide leaves off.

Common problems and how to fix them

Most Copilot trouble comes down to a handful of causes. Run through these before you assume something is broken:

• No Copilot icon. The most common cause is no licence assigned to your account. Check with whoever manages your Microsoft 365 licences. The second most common cause is being signed in with the wrong account.
• “You don’t have a licence” message. Your account is missing the Copilot add-on, or you are using a personal account where the licence sits on a work account. Switch accounts, or ask your admin.
• Copilot ignores my document or data. In Excel, your data may not be formatted as a proper table. In Word, you may need to point Copilot at the right section. Reopen the file and try a more specific prompt.
• Features are missing compared to a colleague. Your app is probably out of date. Go to Account and update. Copilot features roll out almost monthly, so two people on different versions can genuinely see different things.
• It worked yesterday and not today. Usually a sign-in or connectivity hiccup. Sign out and back in with the correct account, and check you are online, since Copilot needs a connection.

If none of that helps, the problem is usually on the organisation’s side (licence, policy, or rollout settings) rather than something you can fix from your own machine. A structured programme like our Digital Transformation with AI Tools course covers Copilot across all five apps in one sitting, so a whole team learns the same fixes at once.

Frequently asked questions

Is Microsoft 365 Copilot free?
No, not the version built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. That one needs a paid licence: either Microsoft 365 Copilot (a business add-on) or Copilot Pro (a consumer add-on). There is a free tier called Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, but it is a separate web and Teams chat experience, not the Copilot pane inside your apps. So you can chat with Copilot for free. Getting it to draft inside your Word document or crunch a sheet inside Excel needs the paid licence.

Do I need a Microsoft 365 subscription to use Copilot?
For the in-app Copilot inside the Office programs, yes. You need a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan (such as Business Standard, Business Premium, or an enterprise E3 or E5 plan), and then the Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on licence attached to your account. Copilot Pro is the consumer route, and it pairs with Microsoft 365 Personal or Family. The free Copilot Chat on the Copilot website needs only a Microsoft account, not a paid subscription.

What is the difference between Copilot and Copilot Chat?
Copilot Chat is a conversational assistant you reach through a browser or the Teams app. It answers questions, drafts text, and can use the web. What it does not do is reach into your own documents or sit inside Word and Excel. Microsoft 365 Copilot is the paid, grounded version that works inside the Office apps and can read your files, emails, and meetings (within your existing permissions) to do work in context. Chat is general. Copilot is grounded in your work.

Which Microsoft 365 apps have Copilot?
The core set is Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Copilot also turns up in OneNote, Loop, OneDrive, SharePoint, Planner, and Power BI, and as a standalone Copilot Chat experience. Each app puts Copilot to work on its own kind of job: prose in Word, data in Excel, slides in PowerPoint, email and meetings in Outlook and Teams. Exactly which features you get depends on your licence and how up to date your apps are.

Is my company data safe when I use Copilot?
Microsoft 365 Copilot works inside your organisation’s existing security and compliance boundary. It can only see content you already have permission to access, your prompts and company data are not used to train the underlying foundation models, and the data stays within the Microsoft 365 service boundary. Even so, treat it like any powerful tool. Confirm your organisation has switched it on deliberately, and do not paste confidential third-party material into the free consumer Copilot, which sits outside that boundary.

How do I get better results from Copilot?
Write prompts that state the task, give the context, and spell out the format you want. Instead of “write an email,” try “Draft a polite email to a supplier asking for a revised quote by Friday, keep it under 120 words, friendly but firm.” Then treat it as a conversation. Read the first draft, tell Copilot what to change, and go again. And always read the output before you send or save it, because Copilot can be confidently wrong.

I hope this overview makes the whole Copilot picture clearer. Do give it a try this week: pick one boring, repetitive task you do every Monday, open the right app, and let Copilot draft the first version for you. Then read it carefully and fix what it got wrong. That one small habit is where the real time savings start.