How to Use Copilot in Microsoft Outlook

So that was some stuff in Excel. Obviously, it's not everything you can do in Excel, but you start to get the idea. And so we want to go through each app to see what kind of things we can do in each and every app.

So Outlook and email. You can get caught up on your emails. It can help you to write your emails.

If you're not good at creating email rules, you want to tell it to create an email rule, it can create email rules for yourself. These are just some of the ideas. Now, when you're using Outlook, this can be the Outlook app.

So the PC app, the Mac app, also iOS. If you have an iOS app, probably Android as well, I believe, and also outlook.com. So you can use it on the website as well. A reminder, what I said earlier, Copilot is only available for the email account you purchased it on, the one that is hosted by Microsoft.

So also, it only supports work or school accounts. Or accounts that are outlook.com, the old hotmail.com, live.com, or MSN email accounts. If you use a third-party provider, like Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud, you can still use that email in Outlook because Outlook can check multiple email addresses from multiple providers.

But Outlook, the app doesn't get Copilot for everything. Outlook gets Copilot for the email address you're paying for. I was somewhat disappointed about that.

I was hoping that when I pay for Copilot, I get it for all of my accounts that I have in Outlook. But it's just gonna be for the one that I paid for it, like the company email. Technically, I could start an email, and if I wanted to write one, I could start it from my company email, draft the email, and then switch to send it from another one after it's written.

But that's risky because what if you accidentally send it from the wrong email address? So you can always still use the chat function, go to copilot. Microsoft.com, tell it to write something there and copy and paste it into one, but it's only integrated into one email address, the one you're paying for, which for a lot of companies is not a big deal because you should be using your company email with Copilot. But for those of us, maybe individual proprietors or something who pay for let's say Copilot Pro, we might have different businesses with different emails, and it's only going to work with one of those. So there is the new Outlook and the old Legacy Outlook, which have different interfaces.

In Outlook on Windows, it works in both. If you're using the older Legacy Outlook, it'll work there. In the new Outlook, it'll also work there.

If you're using the Mac version, it only works in the new Outlook. It doesn't work in the old Legacy Outlook if that matters to you. I know some people have made the switch, some people haven't.

Some people don't like the switch. I don't mind the switch. The new one is perfectly fine for me, but on the Mac, you have to use the new one.

So you could have it summarize some emails. I'm going to do this back on the Windows side of things. I'm going to open up.

So this is the new Outlook here. If you're using the old Legacy Outlook, your interface might look slightly different. It'll be pretty similar, but might be a little bit different.

So let's say, for example, here I open up an email. Notice there's a 'Summarize' option. If I don't feel like reading the whole email, not that this is a very long email, but I could click 'Summarize', and it'll scan that email and give me the highlights.

Obviously, the longer the email, the better this will be because it'll save you time, but you kind of get the highlights of things. It's above each email. It's not in the top time.

So, yeah. So in this email, I could click 'Summarize', and it'll scan that particular email and take all that text that's there and summarize that all into a short little summary. Yeah.

Now, I'm really lazy, and I want that summary to be shorter. Can I say summarize in two sentences? When you click this button, there's no other way to do that. You need to customize the summary.

This button just does what it does. Yeah. So that's kind of built in.

Now, let's say you want to write an email from scratch when creating a new one. So let's say I create a new email. And I want it to start writing here.

So there's a Copilot button that you can choose 'Draft with Copilot.' Or if you want to start drafting with Copilot, remember how there was that slash in the chat to bring up the draft with Copilot? On the Mac, it's command and the slash. On Windows, it's just slash.

So here, for example, if I hit slash, see how it says 'Draft with Copilot'? So I can bring up that. And then I can start typing something in. So what do I want this email to say? I'm going to say, tell Acme Corp that we will do a Figma training online for $3,000 on January 10th.

Now, right now, I'm just drafting this, right? So I typed in a very short thing. They wrote a whole thing of, 'Dear Acme Corp, I hope this message finds you well. I'm excited to inform you that we have scheduled an online Figma training session for your team.'

The training will take place on January 10th, and we'll cover all the essentials and advanced features of Figma to enhance your team's design capabilities. Did I specify that this was for designers? Does it just know that Figma is for design? Yeah, it just knows that Figma is for design. I mean, that's correct.

Figma is for design, but I didn't tell it that. I didn't say who it was for. The cost of this comprehensive training is, now, is this an introductory training? Is it comprehensive? Of course, they're making it sound great.

So it's up to you to decide if you're going to change the tone of this, right? We believe this training will be extremely beneficial to your team, providing them with the skills and knowledge needed to effectively utilize Figma in their projects. Feel free to reach out. I mean, that made a whole nice email from a very short prompt.

Now, is there anything I’d like to change? I can text, I can type something in. Maybe I need to add something to it and say, this is an intro training. Now they're saying this is an introductory training instead of a comprehensive one, which, see how smart that was? I didn’t say where to put that or anything.

I just said, I corrected it, right? So I could type responses in there. I could also edit the prompt and say, okay, make it shorter, make it more formal, make it more casual, make it a poem. I don't, how many times are you sending people an email of a poem? That's a little bit weird, but I understand like the more direct casual, like this might be a little too long, right? Like, let's make it more to the point.

Let's make it more direct, right? I wouldn't say that did that very effectively. Let's make it more casual. We've got an online introductory Figma training lined up for your team on this.

The session will cover all the basics to boost your team's design skills. The cost is this. We're excited to work with your team and help you take your design processes to the next level.

If you don't like it also, you could just say retry because it could generate a different one if you want a little bit of a different take. And yeah, so like this time it added the line breaks in there, which I think is much nicer. So you can always hit retry.

If you really don't like it, you could discard it. But if you like it, I can keep it. And then it's text.

So you can go in and make any changes you want. This is just to start out your email and it's up to you when you're ready to send it. It's not gonna send it for you.

You're just drafting the email here. And that was a whole lot less typing that I had to do. And it makes it sound nice.

Does it know what your company does? Does it have more information about if you want it to be very professional, you want it to be geared to academic audiences, whatever? So the short answer is no, it doesn't have like, it doesn't write like you write. It doesn't write a certain way. So this is kind of using its general knowledge to write.

It's not like trying to write like you do exactly. I would be hopeful that in time, as they can study your emails, this is more of a hope. I'm not saying they're going to do this.

But I hope that in the future, as they start to be able to have more capabilities of looking at past emails that you've written to start get a sense of how you write and train themselves, I see that that could be in theory, a possibility that they could do. They've not said that they're going to do that. So I don't want to give you false hope to say that this is on the horizon.

But I could see that being a feature that they could do at some point. But as of right now, they're just kind of using like the underlying co-pilot, ChatGPT understanding of natural language to write those. It's not your wording, not your language to do that.

In your prompt, you could say target an audience who's academics. Yeah. Write to a college level audience.

Yeah. So your prompt could say how you want it to be. Yes.

I'm going to close that up. Actually, I'm going to just delete that draft. So I don't want to keep that draft.

Another thing is, let's say you write an email and you want to get some feedback. And I specifically wrote kind of a not great email, like an email that you would never want to write. So I'm going to write a new email here.

And oh, see, there's this little type slash to draft with co-pilot. But I'm going to paste this in. Your approval on the design was due three days ago, and we still haven't heard from you.

Why are you ghosting us? What's wrong? This is not a good email to write, obviously. But you might be frustrated and you're like, OK, I'm not patient here. So can you please help me out with improving this? So there's a Copilot button up here.

And this Copilot button, you can draft new emails with Copilot. Or on this email, I could get coaching. So it can be your coach.

And it will look at your email and say, no, that's not a good tone. It can be the tone plate. Use a polite tone instead of, why are you ghosting us? Use, we haven't heard back from you.

What's wrong? Is there an issue we can help you with? Dear, add dear. Because I was not being very polite. I didn't say dear so-and-so or best regards or something.

So the tone, I should be using a polite tone. And I must say, I know I exaggerated the tone of this. But you could just subtly not even realize you weren't using the most positive tone in some of your emails.

So express understanding of potential delays saying, we understand that you may be busy. Could you please provide feedback at your earliest convenience? Thank you for your attention to this matter. Provide clear details, like your approval on such and such a design.

We're concerned about the project timeline. Please let us know by a new deadline. These are all actually good suggestions of things that we could do.

And I could just say, yeah, let's apply these suggestions. Now it's dear so-and-so, which I didn't have before. Your approval on this project was due three days ago and we still haven't heard back from you.

We understand that you may be busy but we are concerned about the project timeline. We haven't heard back from you yet and we wanted to check in to see if there's an issue we can help you with. Could you please provide your feedback at your earliest convenience? Please let us know by a new deadline.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. That is much more polite. Much nicer.

Let's replace that. So you can vent and then say, please turn this into something useful. Just, I would always recommend, don't put in the person you're sending this to until you're done so that you don't accidentally send the bad email.

So, but also, I know this is an exaggeration, but again, it could be something where you're just like, I don't know how to say this nicely. And then you go in with the coaching and it can help you. Like sometimes you're just like, I'm just at a loss for the words of like how to say this politically correct and nice and I don't want to be offensive.

Like this is really useful stuff. And could I do these same kind of things in like ChatGPT or something? Yes, but here I'm doing it here and they're targeting it for a professional audience of like this coaching. Like ChatGPT doesn't do this exact type of coaching of like tone, clear actions.

Like I'd have to write a thing to tell ChatGPT to do it in a certain way. Whereas here it's geared for the right thing. So, it's just a different focus of the way that these things are working.

Microsoft has chosen to take a more business style approach to what business people need to do. And for that, it's very useful. And because of that lack of friction of like, if I have to go to ChatGPT and type in a chat to say, generate an email for this or tone police and then copy and paste it, that I could do it all here in Outlook.

It just reduces friction. So, I'm much more likely to do it. If it's just, imagine doing this like 20 times a day, 50 times a day, 100 times a day.

Every time you have to keep copying and pasting back and forth, it ends up saving a lot of time when you can just have it here in the app, right? So, I'm just gonna delete that. The downside would be all our emails will get into this very generic wording rather than sort of kind of… I mean, if you're worried about sounding too generic, just keep in mind that it's a starting point. You can always add personality, add your own stuff.

Think of it as draft one. And it could be a quick way to get a draft one. And then you can add your own personality, add your own stuff to make it sound a bit more like you.

And that's why it doesn't just send it out. Like I would not want ChatGPT to just write and send an email on my behalf. I'm gonna go in and add my own stuff and maybe rewrite certain sections.

Right. But it can be a nice first draft. Especially when you just got a couple details of things and you wanted to fill it all out and then you can go back and tweak some things.

Now, this one, if you're not doing email rules very often, you might not even think about doing this. But maybe there's certain emails that like you wanna always see it right away. So you might wanna like highlight it or kind of bring it up to the top.

And like, let's say your manager or something. And you always wanna make sure that those things are much more obvious. Of course, you could always go in and create an email rule yourself.

But just to show different ideas of how you can use Copilot, not just for writing emails, but you can actually use it to create rules. You can type in like to create a rule for something. Now, on the Windows version, we have this Copilot button up here at the top.

And I just want to explain the idea here of the different apps. You're gonna see Copilot a lot of places. So for example, when I create a new email, I see Copilot here.

I see Copilot up here. I see Copilot over there.

Copilot is everywhere.

So what's the mentality here? When you're in Outlook, these are apps. These are sections of the app. So in Outlook, you can do mail stuff.

You can do calendar stuff. You can do Copilot in Outlook. They're trying to embed the Copilot chat everywhere.

If you don't wanna fire up a web browser and go to the Copilot chat, you can do the Copilot chat here in Outlook. This is exactly, doesn't this look just like the chat that we had in the browser? Because this is the same exact thing. So you're like, how is this different from the browser? Because it's here in Outlook, it just gives you quicker access to it.

Could you fire up a browser and use it there? Sure. Can you do it here in Outlook? Sure. They're trying to make it so easy.

It's not trying to be confusing to you. They're just saying, hey, everywhere you are, you can quickly get to Copilot. So you don't have to wait to open up a browser, wait for the page to load.

You can just be right here in the app. But is this specific to Outlook? No, this is the general Copilot chat. This can do anything that you want, web, work, just like we did before.

It's not specific to Outlook. When we're in Outlook Mail, what we're doing over here, this is the Outlook toolbar. So this is Outlook specific, email specific.

All of these features are for your emails. Like when you're drafting something, you can bold and italicize text in your email. You can create emails with Copilot.

You can coach your emails with Copilot. So these are specific to the email that you're working with. The one that's at the top, which only is there on Windows, it's not there on the Mac.

You'd have to use the web version of this if you're on the Mac. This button is the overall kind of Outlook chat. This is kind of like when we brought up the chatbot in Excel, how it brings it up.

And here we can do general things, not the drafting, not the coaching. We can do all sorts of things like catch me up on emails from the past day. So it could look at like the most important emails.

We could create an email rule. So this is still the chatbot, but it's specific to Outlook because we're not in the overall chatbot. So I could say, create a rule to highlight emails from so-and-so in red.

So I have create a rule to highlight emails from sierra at danrodney.com in red. So I have an email there, for example. And it opens up the rules and creates a new rule.

Emails from this are red. Now, some people said, well, I could just do that myself. Everything with AI in theory is something you could do yourself.

So it's, did you know how to create a rule? Was it faster for you to type it in or to go do it? You can always choose. The point is that it's not just limited to writing emails. I wanted you to start thinking bigger about that there might be other things that it can do.

I'm not saying that this chat could do everything in Outlook. But don't just think it's for writing. And that's it.

Maybe it could do some other things. So it depends on what capabilities. If it's ones that, like, from this person who you haven't answered.

I don't know if that's an option here. Emails received. My name is subject.

Marked with. Message includes. Received before and after.

I don't see a thing of whether it was read or not. It can help you do things that Outlook can currently do. But if Outlook can't do that, it can't make a feature that Outlook doesn't already have.

If Outlook rules can't detect whether something's been read or not, then Copilot can't make Outlook do things it can't already do. Like, for example, the longitude and latitude. Longitude and latitude.

Excel did not have a feature to do that. So it couldn't do that. Because Excel didn't have that feature.

So it doesn't look like there's a thing that says whether the email was read or not. Right. Yeah.

So in this case, I couldn't create an email rule to do that. But, yeah. So this is the overall kind of chat specific to Outlook because I'm opening it up here next to Outlook.

That's that button. And again, if you're on the Mac, that button doesn't exist. But you can go into the web version of Outlook and that feature exists there if you're on a Mac.