How to Use Copilot in Microsoft 365 as a Financial Analyst

How a Financial Analyst Might Use Copilot with Microsoft 365

I want to show you how a financial analyst might use Copilot with Microsoft 365. We’ll be working with Brian as he goes through his day. He’ll be using Copilot in a number of different apps from Microsoft 365. This will speed up his day and give him better insights.

Summarizing Messages

First, let’s use Copilot to summarize text messages and e-mail messages that Brian’s received over the last few days. I’m going to use this prompt here. We are going to look at the last five days of activities from text and also emails, and I’m going to have Copilot put the information into a table so we can easily see the information and focus on what needs to get done. Here is my prompt here and I’ll start it so Copilot gives me the results in a nice table format. I have got text. I have got e-mail messages. I can easily look at them and focus my attention on what needs to get done. Copilot also offers me additional prompts to allow me to dive deeper on some of these subjects.

Using Copilot with Teams

Next, let’s see how Brian uses Copilot with Teams. In Teams, Brian has a lengthy conversation he had with the supervisor. Let’s see if we can summarize this for Brian using Copilot. I’ve got this simple prompt to create a meeting report of this lengthy thread. Let’s start it. Copilot created this nice summarized report. I can easily copy it from here and paste it into Word to get a better look at it. I’ll copy it here. I can easily then just paste it into Word and get a better look at it. And this is nice because this is one page that summarizes a rather lengthy conversation that Brian had with his supervisor.

Analyzing Data with Copilot

Next, Brian’s going to do some analysis with the help of Copilot. We’ll copy that into Excel and make even further use of that. So let’s get started. Brian wants to get some additional information on other SAS companies. I’m going to point Copilot to the web so that we get information from outside of our organization. I’ve got a simple prompt here asking for the revenue of 15 SAS companies. Let’s run it. So I have a nice table that shows me the annual revenue of the top 15 SAS companies for 2024. Now what I want to do is I want to add employee counts to this table so Copilot can be used iteratively, which means you can add additional requests to an existing result. So what I want to do is add the employee count to this existing table with these existing companies in it. So let’s do that and you can see the activity from Copilot. It’s going out to the web, getting this information, and there I’ve got the information. I start with a simple prompt with Copilot. I add it to the result of that prompt. And now what I want to do is I want to download this. I just click on here. It will go to Excel. We’ll open that up. And here are the results from Copilot directly in Excel. Let’s fix it up a little bit and I’m going to get rid of these last five companies here. Let’s just do that. This column is in billions of dollars. I’m going to use Copilot to reformat this into U.S. dollars. So I have a prompt here with Copilot that shows where the data is and what I want Copilot to do. Let’s run that. So what it’s done, it says I’m going to add a column with those amounts. I’m going to insert that column. Here’s the revenue in U.S. dollars. Next, I want Copilot to add a column that shows me the revenue per employee. I’m going to use this prompt here. Let’s run it again. Copilot tells me what it’s going to do. If I want to do that, I can insert the column and I’m done. So this is an easy way to use Copilot in Excel to help you format to get the information exactly the way that you want it.

Creating Presentations with Copilot

Now Brian’s going to use that information that we just got from Copilot from the web about revenue for the SAS companies. And we’re going to also take some information that he received from a coworker about drivers and revenue projections on that information. So let’s go ahead and do that. We’ll look at Outlook and we’ll also look at PowerPoint. This is some of the information that Brian received from a coworker. He’s going to take this information plus information from Copilot, and he put together a PowerPoint presentation. So let’s take a look at that PowerPoint presentation. So Kevin put together this PowerPoint presentation and what he wants to do is organize it a little bit and Copilot can do that for him. So I’ll make a simple request and see how Copilot handles it. So the prompt is to organize this presentation. It’s going to add some slides and put some right in there. Let’s take a look at it. Copilot added these three slides and this one here and also made sections. Now Brian can keep you as if he wants to or he can change them or get rid of them. But Copilot gives you an easy way to start with some additional PowerPoint slides.

Drafting Responses with Copilot

It’s getting toward the end of Brian’s day. He wants to wrap up a few things from e-mail. So he’s going to use Copilot in Outlook to draft some responses. Here’s the e-mail from a coworker. Let’s draft a response for that. Brian wants to draft a quick response to this. He can use Copilot to do that. So we’re going to hit reply, go to Copilot up here and draft a response with Copilot. Let’s just generate without a prompt. This is a decent response. It’s saved me some time. I’m going to keep it and then send that off to my coworker.

Conclusion

So Brian is pretty much at the end of his work day. He’s used Copilot a lot to provide more insights into the work he’s doing and also to make him more productive. We looked at Copilot in Teams, in Outlook, in Excel, and also PowerPoint. Copilot can make you more productive. If you’re ready to deploy Copilot in Microsoft 365, download our free guide with the link here.