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Getting started with Copilot - Outlook

7 Getting Started with Copilot in Outlook
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In this Video:

Are you tired of drowning in emails and struggling to manage your inbox? Discover how Microsoft 365 Copilot in Outlook can streamline your email workflow and enhance your productivity.

In this video, we delve into the powerful features of Copilot in Outlook designed to automate your email tasks and simplify your communication process. Here’s what you can expect to learn:

  • Streamlined Email Management: Learn how Copilot helps you prioritize your emails by summarizing important messages and identifying urgent tasks, allowing you to focus on what truly matters.
  • Drafting Made Easy: See how you can quickly generate email drafts tailored to specific recipients and contexts, ensuring that your communication is both efficient and effective.
  • Actionable Insights: Explore how to leverage Copilot to collate information from past emails and create comprehensive updates, allowing you to keep your colleagues informed without the hassle of sifting through countless threads.
  • Navigating Limitations: Understand the nuances of using Copilot, including the importance of enabling frontier capabilities for drafting emails directly and saving them to your drafts folder.

Key takeaways from this video include:

  • Practical tips for maximising the use of Copilot in Outlook to automate repetitive tasks.
  • Insights on how to effectively prompt Copilot for better results in email drafting and management.
  • An overview of the ongoing developments within Copilot and how to adapt your usage as features evolve.

Join us as we uncover the potential of Microsoft 365 Copilot in Outlook, transforming your email experience into a more manageable and productive endeavor.

FAQ

1. What can Microsoft 365 Copilot do in Outlook?

Microsoft 365 Copilot in Outlook can help you summarise emails, understand what matters in your mailbox, draft replies, and create new emails more quickly. It becomes more useful when you give it context, such as a selected email thread or a clear instruction about the outcome you need.

2. Does Copilot work differently depending on which email I have selected?

Yes. When you select an email, Copilot can use that message as context and adjust its suggested prompts accordingly. That can make it easier to summarise a thread, draft a reply, or ask a specific question about the message without having to explain everything manually.

3. Can Copilot draft emails for me in Outlook?

Yes. Copilot can generate email copy based on a short prompt, such as asking it to write to a specific person about a current task or update. Depending on how you prompt it and which mode is available, it may either generate text for you to review or create a usable draft in Outlook.

4. Why does Copilot sometimes give me email text instead of a real Outlook draft?

That can happen because there is a difference between generating content and taking action in the mailbox. In some cases, Copilot may return a subject line and body that you still need to copy into an email. In other cases, it can create an actual draft, depending on the mode and capabilities available at the time.

5. What should I watch out for when reviewing Copilot-drafted emails?

Always review the final draft before sending. One example from this workflow is sign-off duplication, where Copilot may add a closing such as a name sign-off while your email signature is also inserted separately. A quick check helps avoid awkward repetition and keeps the message professional.

6. What does “allow actions” mean in Outlook Copilot?

“Allow actions” refers to a mode where Copilot can do more than just generate text. In this workflow, it may be able to create and save a draft directly in your mailbox rather than only showing you suggested copy. This can be especially useful when you want to prepare emails quickly and review them later.

7. Can Copilot help me draft follow-up emails based on a longer email history?

Yes. One of the more useful workflows is asking Copilot to review a thread or a group of related emails, pull out action items or progress updates, and then draft a response based on that history. This is where Copilot can save more time than simple one-line email drafting.

8. Is Copilot in Outlook still changing?

Yes. Based on this workflow, Outlook Copilot is useful, but some behaviours and action-based features are still evolving. That means prompting style, draft handling, and mailbox actions may change over time, so it is worth testing what works best in your environment and reviewing results before sending.

All right. It’s the big one. It’s Outlook. Everyone wants to automate their emails. No one. wants to deal with the avalanche of stuff that is getting sent all the time. So Copilot in Outlook. has a couple of core features that are quite useful, um, but they all start with opening up Copilot.
So you’ll see here it’s got work web, all the standard stuff you expect, uh, and it’s got the little prompt, uh, window. Now, you might notice it’s, it’s already got this Copilot videos thing selected here because I have that email selected at the moment. So if I press the X on that, that drops that away, and now I’m in more of a, more of a generic chat.
You can see it’s offering me. suggested prompts like what’s m- matters most in my mailbox, you’ know, what’s urgent, um, and some other things like that. If I click on an email, it’ adds it’ into this window, and you’ll see the suggestions change. Do you wanna summarize this email?
Do you wanna summarize a reply to this email? Um, and so it gets that extra content, uh, extra context of what you’ve got selected. Now, if I drop those off, I can just go back and forth and ask it questions. If I select a video, uh, sorry, video, an email, uh, you’ll see that I can ask specific questions about that email or, or, you know, draft a response to that specific email.
Now, this just helps guide Copilot. I could, in theory, drop this off and say, you know, “The email, uh, that I, that I sent out on the, on the twenty-sixth, I wanna f- do another follow-up and send it to all those same people,” and it’ll do a pretty good job of interpreting that request, and it’ll find it, and it’ll do it.
But this just makes it quicker, right? You know, the more you can do, the, the better, the better the outcome. Now, there are some nuances to the way that Outlook and Copilot work. So right now, I could s- I could, I could ask it’ to draft me an email to someone.
So I’ll say, uh, you know, “Draft me an email to Rob letting him know that I’m working on the Copilot training videos.” Now it’s gonna go and, I guess, give me a couple of options. That’s interesting, right? Rob and I, you know, our, our tone changes depending on who’s on the email, obviously.
Um, and so it’s given me some options there. Three options. Wow. Okay, cool. Uh, so let’s go, uh, go with option one. Cool. So it’s got it’ there. Now, that’s not a draft email. That’s not… I, I can’t do anything with that. I have to copy/paste that into an email.
That’s no good. Uh, so I’m gonna say, “Draft this for me to send.” Now, the last time I ran this little demo, it worked straight away, and gave me exactly what’ I wanted. So, you know, this is one of those things where, you know, it’s a work in progress, right?
The, it’s, it’s gonna change. over time. So it’s come back and said, “Okay, cool, Kane. All right. You want it as a draft, right? I mean, I understand.” Here’s the subject. Here’s the body. Here’s who you’re gonna send it to. Now, I can’t just hit send here at the moment, okay?
So, all right, what’s, what’s the go there? If I hit edit and send, it’s gonna open up the email, insert everything, and you’ll notice that my signature has been inserted. Now, our signatures are done automatically, um, by a third-party product. So Copilot has no awareness of my signature, uh, and so it kind of did a little sign-off here with the “Thanks, Kane.” Uh, but this is one of those little nuances that if you’re aware of, not a big deal.
You can just can that. Um, it’s if you don’t pay attention, you might say, you know, “Thanks, Kane. Kind regards, Kane.” You’re like, “What’s going on here? Clearly using AI in your email.” Um, so that’s something to, to look out for. However, this is just essentially Outlook now, right?
And so, um, the fact is I couldn’t send it from here. So if I had done… If I’d had this conversation on the 365 app on my mobile, it would not have given me much to work with other than I can copy/paste, um, which is a prob- which is, you know, problematic.
So the thing here is that send, that taking action in your mailbox right now, is what’s called a frontier capability, which means your business, your account needs to have frontier mode enabled, which is… Frontier is essentially beta. This is an alternative word for beta. Uh, and so if I drop this default mode to allow actions, it very well could have created an actual draft email, in my drafts without showing it here.
And so if I’m on my mobile, I would wanna hit, you’ know, allow actions so that I can say, “Draft an email to Rob letting him know, that I’m recording the videos. Save it to my drafts folder.” That way, when I come back to the office, I can review the email.
before it gets sent in the way that it’s gonna look, um, because, you know, I wouldn’t be tapping away on my phone too much for, for an email. Um, and so that’s the other option here. Now, you might not have frontier. Uh, and if you don’t, you will be stuck with this kind of experience for now.
The idea with frontier is that most of those things move into a general availability later on. Um, but that’s one of those current little nuances about the way that it, it works. Um, and so if I click allow actions now, it’s actually too late. And what’s happening, at least right this moment, is that I’ll s- I’ll click that on and say, “Okay, cool.
Create a draft now,” and it’s gonna say, “Well, what subject and body do you want me to put in that?” And so I have to copy/paste it. But if I knew ahead of time, hey, I’m, you know, I wanna draft this thing and send it, when I hit new conversation, I can drop that default mode to allow actions.
I’ll drop this one off and drop this one off ’cause I just wanna create a new draft. And I’ll say, you know, “Draft me an email, to Rob letting him, uh, know that, uh, he, needs to record his Copilot training videos.” Now, I haven’t been very specific there.
I’ve just said, “Draft me an email.” So it could interpret a number of ways. It could give me the subject and the body. It could have that same little edit and send thing. Or it might say, “I have saved your draft to your folders.” Um, so depending on what it comes back with, I’ll go back to it again and tell it more specifically.
But if I’d added in at the start here- Go save this as a draft. I do not wanna see it right now. It’ll go and pub- it should go and push it straight to my folder. Um, but this is just one of those little things where, like, your prompting style with it will, will evolve over time.
Drafted you an email. My draft count went up. It was 38, now it’s 39. So in theory, I could hit drafts and there’ll be a bunch… Uh, there’ll be a new draft in there telling Rob, “Hey, Rob, go record your, your videos.” So that, that’s one of those, l- again, one of those little nuances.
Not a big problem, as long as you know about it. Um, and so yeah, those are the kinds of things, um, uh, that are quite useful when it comes to Outlook. Um, now, when… Uh, this is obviously just drafting a blank email about something new, right? However, if I was looking to collate a bunch of information, I can do that in this chat.
I can say, “Go and find every email, uh, that I, that Rob and I have gone back and forth about these Copilot video things. Pull out any action items, and figure out whether I’ve actioned them or not, and generate a nice email I can send back to him to let him know the actual progress.” Um, and it might have to, you know, extract, you know, nine or 10 emails.
Go back and look for another few more, then generate that output and save it in my drafts. And so you can tie some of these steps together in order to make it work quite nicely. Um, and so that’s the, that’s where, like, the real value is. You know, drafting an email, I could, I could send Rob a one-line email, uh, and he’d get it, and it wouldn’t be a problem at all.
Um, but if I had to do some of that more mundane stuff where, you know, I, I know how it’s progressing. I, I don’t have a problem with it. But, you know, Rob asked for a s- for a specific format. Okay, cool. I get Copilot to do that, right?
Um, I’ll make sure that it’s accurate. But all that formatting, nah, letting AI do that now. Um, so that’s, that’s Outlook. Uh, Copilot in Outlook. It’s useful. Uh, def- definitely is useful. But it’s a, it’s a, it’s a changing space. Um, and so do keep your eye out for this one in particular.
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