Microsoft Details Latest Copilot for Microsoft 365 Features

Back in February, Microsoft announced that it would start documenting all the new features it adds to Copilot for Microsoft 365 each month. Last night, it provided the second such monthly update, for March 2024.

“Every month, we’ll be highlighting new features and enhancements for Copilot for Microsoft 365,” Microsoft’s TJ Devine reminds readers. “Whether you’re a Microsoft 365 admin for a large enterprise or smaller company or someone who uses Copilot for Microsoft 365 for their daily work, these updates let you know about new and upcoming features and where you can find more information to help make your Copilot experience a great one.”

Key new features in Copilot for Microsoft 365 include:

Ground Copilot prompts in work content. AI comes with a lot of lingo baggage, so you can add the term ground (and related terms like grounding) to the list of unfamiliar terms you need to learn: When one grounds an LLM or chatbot like Copilot, what you’re doing is limiting its information base set to a more finite, use-case specific subset to make it faster, more reliable, and more accurate. Grounding Copilot to work content is, for many knowledge workers, the holy grail, as it restricts its access to the data you and your organization has in chats, documents, meetings, and emails. You are, in other words, grounding Copilot in your organization’s Microsoft Graph. To be clear, this is a big deal, and a key component in determining whether Copilot will be broadly useful to businesses. This capability is rolling out in April, and you can learn more at the Microsoft Support website.

Copilot grounded chat in the Microsoft 365 mobile app. Commercial customers who use the Microsoft 365 app on Android or iPhone can now use its Microsoft 365 Chat feature to “connect to and reason” across the chats, documents, meetings, and emails in your organization. As Microsoft notes, you can ask Copilot to catch you up on pre-reads, meetings, conversations, and document updates; summarize, translate, and explain documents, or ask questions about any content, and receive answers grounded in organizational data; and create work documents, emails, blogs, or presentations by generating content based on their inputs, existing information, and past work. Again, a big deal.

Interact with Copilot in (the new) Outlook. Copilot is now available as a pane in the new Outlook for Windows and Outlook on the web. And it appears to work just like other similar implementations in Windows 10/11 and Microsoft Edge. “Copilot can help you find a specific email, summarize your meetings, or outline emails in your inbox that may contain an action item for you,” Microsoft notes. “You can even use it to go through your inbox in minutes by asking questions like, ‘What is the latest email from my manager?’ or ‘Show me the emails where I’ve been @mentioned’.” You can learn more about Copilot in Outlook at the Microsoft Support website.

Copilot in Excel improvements. Copilot is picking up some new features in Excel (presumable for Windows and web, it’s not clear), including the ability to prompt Copilot verbally with the microphone. There’s also a new “View Prompts” item that opens a Prompts Guide so you can create new prompts, edit prompts, view previous prompts, and more. Copilot in Excel is unique among the app-specific Copilots in Microsoft in that it’s still in preview. You can learn more about the Excel-specific features on the Microsoft Support website.

Copilot in Loop improvements. Copilot in Loop gains improved information parsing at the page level, which leads to more relevant output when asking questions about a file. “For example, now you can prompt Copilot about specific parts of a page, such as ‘Summarize the content of the first section’ or ‘List out the deadlines in this table’,” Microsoft notes. “This helps you get up to speed with what’s in files quickly, so you can move on to other tasks.” You can learn more about Copilot in Loop on the, wait for it, Microsoft Support website.

Restricted SharePoint Search. Rolling out in April, Restricted SharePoint Search is designed for companies concerned about the unintentional over-sharing of organization content, and it lets admins disable organization-wide search and limit Copilot to specific SharePoint sites. It’s also billed as a “temporary solution” that organizations use while they implement more viable information sharing rules company-wide using tools such as Microsoft Purview (data security) and SharePoint Advanced Management (document lifecycle). You can learn more in this Microsoft Tech Community blog post.

Microsoft also notes that you can now view all the sessions from its late February Copilot in Microsoft 365 Tech Accelerator online. It looks like a useful set of content for anyone tasked with figuring out and deploying Copilot for Microsoft 365 in an organization. You should also check out the Microsoft 365 Roadmap for a nice overview of what’s coming in soon across the stack. If anything, Copilot has made this even more confusing: There are four new features rolling out now for Copilot in Microsoft 365 alone, and 20 more on the way.