Welcome to this tutorial on Copilot, an AI assistant developed by Microsoft.

If you're new to AI, this guide will walk you through everything you need to know about using Copilot effectively.

Key Objectives:

• Understand what Copilot is and how it was developed.
• Learn how to get started with Copilot.
• Explore basic usage of Copilot.
• Discover practical applications and best practices for using Copilot.

What’s Copilot?

Microsoft Copilot is an AI-powered assistant designed to boost your productivity across all your favorite Microsoft apps. By leveraging powerful language models like GPT-4 from OpenAI, Copilot understands your natural language queries, providing helpful responses, suggestions, and even automating tasks. It works seamlessly with Microsoft 365 apps, Windows, and Bing, making it a versatile tool.

Versions (free/paid)

There are a few different versions of Copilot to suit your needs:

• Free Version:
  • Available in Bing, the Edge browser, and Windows.
  • Offers basic search help and answers questions.
  • There is a limit of 5 messages per conversation. However, it seems that this limit can vary depending on the browser you are using. For instance, the limit is 30 messages per conversation when using the Edge browser.

• Copilot for Microsoft 365 ($30/user/month):
  • Integrates into Office apps.
  • Provides advanced features like document summarization, data analysis, and content creation.
• Copilot Pro ($20/month):
  • Gives you priority access to the latest AI models.
  • Lets you create custom chatbots and generate higher-resolution images.

Key Features

Copilot is packed with features that make your work easier across different Microsoft applications:

• In Word:
  • Summarizes long documents.
  • Drafts new content for you.
  • Polishes and refines existing text.
• In Excel:
  • Helps with data analysis.
  • Provides valuable insights from your data.
• In PowerPoint:
  • Assists in creating presentation slides.
• In Outlook:
  • Drafts emails based on context.
• In Teams:
  • Gives meeting recaps.
  • Offers suggestions and translations.

On top of all this, Copilot can answer your questions, explain complex concepts, and help generate ideas or content based on your prompts.

Getting Started with Copilot

Setting up Copilot

Go to copilot.microsoft.com (optional, you can use the free version without an account) and sign in with your Microsoft account or create a new one.

You should arrive on this page:

If you have a Microsoft 365 subscription for your organization, you'll need to purchase the Copilot for Microsoft 365 add-on, which costs $30 per user per month.

Install the Copilot extension or app within the specific Microsoft 365 apps you want to use it with, like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams.

Using Copilot in Microsoft 365 Apps

Once installed, Copilot will be accessible through command bars, sidebars, or dedicated panes within each app.

In apps like Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook, you can input prompts or requests in natural language, and Copilot will provide suggestions, content generation, or task automation based on your input and data context.

For example, in Word, you can ask Copilot to "Summarize the key points from this document," and it will generate a summary.

In PowerPoint, you can request Copilot to "Create slides on [topic]," and it will generate presentation content.

In Outlook, Copilot can draft emails based on the context or recipient information.

Starting a conversation

In the chat interface, you can initiate a conversation by typing your query or prompt in natural language. For example, you can ask a question, request content creation, or seek assistance on a specific task.

Provide context by specifying the information sources, data ranges, or files that Copilot should reference to generate a relevant response. You can also share your goals, audience, and desired tone for the response.

From there, you can either continue the conversation or start a new one with the "New topic" button.

Copilot GPTs

Copilot can take on different roles, each powered by GPT. Let’s go through them:

1. Designer: As a designer, the AI can help with tasks related to design, such as providing suggestions for color schemes, layout designs, or even generating simple graphics based on descriptions.
2. Vacation Planner: In this role, the AI can assist with planning a vacation. It can suggest destinations, create itineraries, provide information about local attractions, and more.
3. Cooking Assistant: When acting as a cooking assistant, the AI can provide recipes based on specific ingredients, offer cooking tips, explain cooking techniques, and so on.
4. Fitness Trainer: As a fitness trainer, the AI can provide workout routines, offer fitness advice, and provide information about different exercises.

Remember, while the AI can perform these roles to some extent, it’s not a replacement for professional advice or services.

Other features you might like

Conversation style: although you can ask Copilot to give responses in a certain tone, you can also directly choose the conversation style before starting a new conversation. There are three styles:

• Creative: for original, imaginative chats.
• Balanced: for everyday, informed chats.
• Precise: for concise, useful for fact checking chats.

Thumbs: they allow you to rate the relevance and quality of the answer you got. I'm not entirely sure if it's going to influence the model's responses or if it's just some kind of feedback the AI team of Microsoft will use.

Image: you can share images with Copilot, which is useful if you want to ask a question that is quicker to describe with a picture (for instance if you want to know the race of a dog you saw in the street!).

Export: allows you to export an answer you got as a .txt file, PDF or Word document.

Using Copilot for daily tasks

In this part, we'll give you one use case per GPT, to give you an idea of the scope of Copilot's possibilities.

Copilot

Copilot can be really good at assisting in writing code or debugging.

Prompt:

Help me write a Python function to sort a list of numbers.

Designer

Designer is perfect to generate images and creative assets. 

Prompt:

Create an image of a futuristic city skyline at dusk. The city has towering skyscrapers with neon lights, flying cars zipping through the sky, and advanced public transportation systems on elevated tracks.

Vacation Planner

Vacation planner could be really helpful to make a trip itinerary.

Prompt:

Plan a 7-day trip to Paris, France.

Cooking Assistant

The cooking assistant could help you if you have ingredients in your fridge but don't know what to cook with them.

Prompt:

Give me a recipe using chicken, broccoli, and rice.

Fitness Trainer

A good use case is to ask it to create a personalized workout plan.

Prompt:

Create a 30-minute workout plan for a beginner.

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