How to Use Copilot in Microsoft 365 as a Finance Manager

I want to show you how a finance manager might use Copilot in Microsoft 365. This is the scenario here. The finance manager, Kevin, has a number of things he wants to do today. You can see those listed here. I’m going to go through this and we’re going to use PowerPoint, we’re going to use Word, and we’re going to use Excel, and I’ll show you how to use Copilot with those products.

I’m going to leave the prompts in so you can see some prompts that are available. Also, I’ll go over the prompts that I use.

Using Copilot in PowerPoint

Creating a Presentation

First of all, Kevin wants to make a presentation about his company first quarter earnings, so let’s take a look at how we might do that. I’m going to start with a blank PowerPoint presentation and go to Copilot up here. And I’m going to use one of these prompts. And I’ve got some information downloaded about Home Depot, so I’m going to use that to designate a file. I can just put a slash in there like that. And here’s the link to the document in my OneDrive. So now I’ll start Copilot and let’s see what we get.

Reviewing the Slide Deck

So Copilot produced a fairly lengthy slide deck. It’s got a number of items in it. We’ll look at it, but first I want to show you the source document. This is the source document that I had on my OneDrive. Copilot went out and looked at this and then created the PowerPoint presentation. So we’ve got quite a few nice slides here. Let’s scroll down a little bit more. These are a little more interesting, maybe visually.

Making Adjustments

So what’s nice about this is this gives Kevin a nice start on putting the slide deck together. So you’re going to want to make changes. Also verify that the information is right that he got in the different slides because Copilot did it based on what it knows about that document. So this is important. Copilot provides a really great way to start with the slide deck because the slide deck has a lot of components to it, but you want to verify it to make sure it’s correct. But you may also want to change some things. You may want to take slides out. You may want to add slides, but it gives you an excellent way to start. This is going to save you a lot of time if you need to make slide decks from scratch.

Adding a Company Overview Slide

Now let’s try adding a slide with a company overview. Let’s try this prompt and see what we get in here. Copilot created an additional slide I can add to the deck if I want to. May want to change this. Probably need a more interesting visual for this before we continue.

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Using Copilot in Word

Summarizing Competitor Activities

Now let’s go into Word and see if Kevin can use Copilot to summarize the activities of a competitor. So I have Lowe’s quarterly report right here. It’s already in Word. I’m going to use Copilot to summarize it. Here we go.

Creating a Summary

So Copilot goes through and summarizes this and makes it easy to copy. It’s going to copy the results, set up a new document, paste, and there I go. I’ve got a summary. This was easy to do. Copilot did all the work. I just provided the source document. This makes life for Kevin a lot easier.

Using Copilot in Excel

Analyzing Sales Data

Now let’s take a look at Copilot in Excel. I have this Excel spreadsheet. This has a lot of customer sales data from Business Central. I can use Copilot to easily make sense of this data. Here I’m going to have Copilot add a column that shows a year of each transaction. What I like about Copilot in Excel, if you ask it to add a column, add some different information, it’s going to tell you what it’s going to do for it before it actually does it. It gives you the option then to insert the column in this case. So let’s insert the column.

Using Standard Prompts

Now I’m going to ask Copilot to do another task for me. So let’s get this started. It gave me this. This is not particularly helpful, so I’m going to go back to the data. So what I’m going to do is view some standard prompts that are available with Copilot. I’m going to use this prompt. Another thing I like about Copilot in Excel is it will suggest new tabs for you. For example, let’s add this sheet right here.

Conclusion

And with Copilot, a finance manager like Kevin can get a lot of work done in a shorter amount of time and get different insights into the data that’s part of his business. We looked at how Copilot can be used in PowerPoint to get a really good start on a new slide deck. We looked at Copilot in Word and how it can be used to summarize a lot of data. We also looked at Excel. We looked at how Copilot can create new columns in Excel and provide analysis in Excel. This is a nice tool. A finance manager could easily use Copilot to shorten his work day and give him more time to do further analysis on his business and work with customers and vendors and other people in his organization.