Overview
The Copilot licence is paid for. Is anyone using it for more than a spell check? The monthly sales pack still gets built by hand, three hours of export and rewriting on the same Thursday night, and the licence renews anyway.
Two days of practice change that. Day 1 is how to tell Copilot what you want, and how scattered sources become a report a director signs. Day 2 is the numbers, the deck and the email, then a team challenge that runs all four apps. You leave with prompts that work on your own recurring tasks.
Who should attend
- Executives, managers and administrative professionals
- Business users and knowledge workers who work in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook
- Participants with everyday familiarity with the four apps; no coding is needed
What you will be able to do
- Tell whether a Copilot answer came from company data or the public web, and repeat the privacy rules.
- Brief Copilot with the RCR framework (Role, Context, Request) and fill in the context with the 5W1H checklist.
- Draft a structured report in Word from several source files, then rewrite one paragraph without disturbing the rest.
- Summarise a long email thread, draft a reply with the right tone, and prepare for the meeting after it.
- Prepare a workbook for Copilot, ask analytical questions of it, and write formula columns from plain English.
- Build charts and KPI views in Excel, then write the variance narrative a manager can read.
- Generate a management deck from a finished Word report, then edit it one slide at a time.
- Chain Copilot across Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Outlook to turn a month of sales data into a presented pack.
Course content
Day 1: Content creation and communication
- Introduction to Microsoft 365 Copilot: the three in-product licence labels that decide what works inside Word, Excel and PowerPoint, web grounding against work grounding through Work IQ, clicking the citation before you believe the sentence, and the privacy rules, including what Enterprise Data Protection does not cover.
- Prompt engineering essentials: the RCR framework and the 5W1H checklist, the negative brief (the words, sections and names to leave out), and interactive prompting, where Copilot interviews you one question at a time.
- Copilot in Word: briefing Copilot from several files at once, rewriting one selected paragraph without disturbing the rest, summarising a long document down to its decisions, the executive summary, and keeping the finished report as next month's template.
Day 2: Data analysis and presentation
- Copilot in Outlook: summarising a long thread before you reply, drafting a reply and adjusting tone and length with Coaching by Copilot as the check, and meeting preparation notes and follow-up emails with action items.
- Copilot in Excel, data analysis fundamentals: the rule that the data has to be a table, cleaning an exported file on a copy, and writing formula columns from plain English.
- Copilot in Excel, dashboards and insights: asking analytical questions of the sheet, charts and KPI views for a management pack, and the variance narrative for the deck.
- Copilot in PowerPoint: generating the deck from the finished Word report, working inside your organisation's template with the real Excel chart on the slide, speaker notes, and single-slide edits.
- End-to-end business scenario challenge: in teams of three or four, chain Copilot across Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Outlook on one running case, present the pack in five minutes, then take part in a structured peer review.
How it runs
- Experiential learning with about 70 percent hands-on practice, live demonstrations and one running case study.
- Bring a laptop signed in to your work account with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence.
- The team challenge closes the course, with a presented pack and peer review.
- Delivered in person.
