Following last month's guide on making the most out of Copilot in Microsoft Teams, in the second of our series Copilot focussed HowTos, we'll be taking a look at how it can help you put draft ideas and transform your text in Microsoft Word.
Draft with CoPilot
To use Copilot to help you draft something from a set of brief prompts, you'll want the "Draft with Copilot" feature. In a blank document, click the on-page Copilot icon or Alt + i to start.
You can enter whatever you like in the panel that appear.s. The more you add here, the closer the generated content will be to what you're trying to achieve. Of course, it might be that you're not entirely sure what you're writing yet, so you could keep it vague and see what it comes up with.
Once you've hit "Generate" just wait while it creates something based on your ideas. Once generated, you can start making your own edits straight away if there's anything useful in what it's given you. Alternatively, there's options for futher refinement.at the bottom of the page
In this example, we've given in an instruction to make it funnier. You can then hit the regenerate button and see what it comes up with!
Rewrite with Copilot
As you might expect, it's also possible to come at things from the other direction and get Copilot to rewrite existing content. Just select the text you want Copilot to look at and hit the Copilot button inline.
In the example above, we've borrowed some text from one of our blogs last month, and we're going to get Copilot to have a go at rewriting it.
Copilot will then give you three alternative versions of the text you've selected. You can mix and match between these. You can also get it to vary the tone in a particular direction. Naturally, our prose is always perfect first time, but this feature will likely be useful for text that's a little rough around the edges that you want to quickly bash into better shape.
General Copilot assistance
As with Teams last month and most of the Office apps, there's also a big Copilot button in the top right that will open a panel that you can enter general queries about the document you have open.
In the example above, we've asked it to summarise the current document. As with this panel elsewhere, you can ask follow up questions (e.g. "Give me more detail on this point") or take the line of questions in a different direction entirely.