How to Use Copilot in Microsoft 365 as an Operations Project Manager

I want to show you how an operations project manager might use Copilot in Microsoft 365. We’re going to look at how you can use Copilot inside a number of different Microsoft 365 applications. We’ll look at Outlook, Teams, Excel, Whiteboard, and PowerPoint. So let’s get started.

Using Copilot in Outlook

Terry is starting her day as a project manager by looking in Outlook. She wants to summarize all the information about a project in Outlook. We’re going to use Copilot for that.

You’ll see that Copilot suggests a number of prompts. The prompts are key to getting Copilot to give you the information that you’re looking for. Here, I’ve got a simple one: I’m looking to summarize information about projects.

Copilot starts by looking at all the information in the Microsoft 365 instance. You can see it brings up a number of things here. One thing I like about Copilot is it not only gives you the information, but it also provides a link to the source of that information.

Let’s take a look at this Word document here. This is an outline of a change management program, and we’re going to take a look at this later on. And this is a project in Excel. We’re going to use Copilot to suggest some different columns and calculations.

Using Copilot in Teams

Now, I’m in Teams. I’ve made some notes to myself. I’m going to save this here in Teams, but I can also use Copilot to access other information about a particular subject. I go to Copilot, put in a simple prompt, and run it. This gives me even more information, including emails about the project, team messages about projects, plus the documents we previously looked at.

Terry has gotten her day off to a good start. She’s looked at Outlook and Teams, and she’s gotten information from Copilot about everything related to projects.

Using Copilot in Excel

Next, let’s take a look at the project itself in Excel. I’m going to use Copilot to enhance how this project looks in Excel. Let’s go to Copilot and take this prompt suggestion. What I like about Copilot in Excel is that it will suggest changes to columns or formulas, but it won’t actually make the changes until you agree.

Here you can see it suggested this column. Let’s add that column. It’s inserted the column right here. This is really nice and can save me some time. If you’re not really great with Excel, this can save you a lot of time.

Let’s add another simple one. Let’s look at insights from Copilot and put them in the form of charts. It’s done two things here: it’s created a chart, which we can add to the new sheet, and it has the information and the chart. Here’s a pivot table on it. This makes it really easy to get information from your Excel spreadsheet and display it in a different way, maybe something that adds additional insight to that information.

Copilot in Excel is very powerful. I can add columns, add formulas, and gain additional insights into the data right from Excel.

Using Copilot in Whiteboard

Next, let’s look at a brainstorming session that Terry had with her group. They’re going to use Whiteboard to do this. We’ll take a look at Whiteboard in Microsoft 365 and make it a little easier to look at with Copilot.

Whiteboard is excellent for brainstorming. It allows individual participants in the Whiteboard session to put ideas on the whiteboard and get an idea of what’s important to the team and the project. But when you look at this, you might think it’s not organized very well. You can move things around manually, but do you really want to do that? Probably not. Let’s use Copilot to make more sense out of this.

Go to Copilot at the bottom, and we’re going to categorize this now. This is much more useful, right? This is a good discussion tool. I can take this, show it to the management team, and they’ll have a better idea of what we’re working on. It also allows us as team members to look at it and say, “Maybe we should add something here or take something away.” You can easily do this in a whiteboard and have Copilot rearrange it for you.

Using Copilot in PowerPoint

Next, I want to show you Copilot with PowerPoint. We previously looked at a plan for change management and readiness, so let’s take that and turn it into a PowerPoint presentation. We have a blank presentation in PowerPoint, and I’m going to use Copilot to look at the previous Word document we had about readiness and change management and create a deck for me.

I’m going to use this prompt here, and then I’ve got this information in SharePoint. I’ll copy the link, paste it into the prompt, and let Copilot do its thing. It’s going to analyze that Word document, organize it a little bit, and make a presentation out of it.

Here’s a presentation generated by Copilot based on that Word document. It has not only nice slides but also speaker notes. You probably don’t want to just take this and run into a meeting, but it’s a very good way to start on a presentation so you get an idea of what it might look like. You can make changes here and there, take slides away, add slides, and again, it’s a big time saver if you are making a presentation.

Conclusion

So we took a look at how Terry, a project manager in the operations area, might use Copilot to speed up her day, get better information out of her data, and make it better to present to people on her team and her management team. Copilot is a great time saver; you should really take a look at it.

If you’re ready to deploy Copilot in Microsoft 365, download our free guide with a link in our video description.

Does this work for you?