Inspired after watching the Microsoft Copilot Super Bowl ad? In this video, we will learn five Microsoft Copilot tips and tricks for being more productive!
Even if you already knew about Copilot, if you were looking for help, this video is for you!
Need more help? How about hours of training on #Copilot, Copilot for #Microsoft365, Copilot for Power Platform, and more?
Video Summary
Here are the key points from the video:
- Sign In for Full Features: Signing in with a Microsoft account unlocks more features in Copilot, such as unlimited prompts, image creation, and plugin additions. Without signing in, you’re limited to five prompts per day and no personalization.
- Crafting Effective Prompts: Good prompts include a clear goal, context, sources, and expectations. The more detailed your prompt, the better the results you’ll get from Copilot.
- Using Copilot in Edge: Copilot in Edge can access the context of the current page, making it easier to summarize content or create social media posts. This feature is particularly useful for summarizing long articles or videos.
- Keep It Conversational: If Copilot doesn’t get it right the first time, keep the conversation going. Ask for alternatives or more details until you get the desired result. It’s free to keep interacting with Copilot.
- Check for Accuracy: Always verify the information provided by Copilot. It can make mistakes or provide outdated information, so double-checking is crucial.
For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!
Video Transcript
Hello everyone, my name is Vlad Catrinescu, and if your goal is to become more productive with Microsoft Copilot, you’re at the right spot. By now, you have probably already seen the Super Bowl commercial that Microsoft did to inspire us on how artificial intelligence can change our lives. It was truly a beautiful ad that showed that artificial intelligence is not only for IT professionals, developers, or people who work with computers every single day. Artificial intelligence is here for everyone, whatever your job may be, whatever your goals might be. AI and Microsoft Copilot are here to help you become more productive.
As I’m doing this video, I really want to emphasize that you do not need to be an IT professional or a prompt engineer, as people call them now, to use Microsoft Copilot. Microsoft Copilot is very easy to use and natural to use. However, there are a few tips and tricks that you need to know about in order to get the best experience possible, especially if Microsoft Copilot is the first artificial intelligence tool that you will interact with regularly. So let’s get started.
Tip number one: The account you log in with matters. Make sure that you are signed in when using Copilot. You can access Microsoft Copilot without signing in at all, but you might reach some limitations pretty fast. Many people do not know that technically there are four different ways of being signed in with Microsoft Copilot, each one of them, and even two different subscriptions, will give you different capabilities. The first one is Copilot Free, which requires no sign-in at all. You can open up an incognito or an in-private tab today, go to copilot.microsoft.com, and start using Copilot without signing in. The other option is Copilot Free but signed in with your Microsoft account, such as your Outlook account or the Microsoft account you use to connect on Xbox. Signing in with any Microsoft account unlocks many features, which we’ll talk about in just a few seconds. There are also premium subscriptions such as Microsoft Copilot Pro, the premium Copilot subscription for individuals, and Microsoft Copilot with commercial data protection for enterprises.
I want to focus on the free experience with Microsoft Copilot and why I think you should be signed in when you use it. When you use Copilot and are not signed in, you are limited to five prompts daily. A prompt is an interaction with your artificial intelligence tool, in this case, Microsoft Copilot. If you use Copilot and are signed in with a Microsoft account, you have unlimited conversations daily. Without being signed in, you have a limit of five prompts per conversation, but with a Microsoft account, you can go up to 30 prompts per conversation. This allows you to keep the conversation on the same subject going, and Copilot will keep that history when you interact with it, further improving the result you’re looking for. Without being signed in, there is no personalization to your Copilot experience. Every time you go, there’s no history saved, and your conversations are not saved at all, so you always start from a blank slate. AI will be pretty good at adapting the answer it gives you depending on the prompt, but still, if you allow personalization, which is available with a Microsoft account, it will get to know you. After a while, it will be able to offer you better results. Some of you might not be a fan of having your conversations saved in Microsoft Copilot, and that’s okay; you can turn it off. If you are not signed in with Microsoft Copilot, you cannot create images, but if you sign in with a Microsoft account, you can. Without a Microsoft account, you cannot add plugins, which you can do with a Microsoft account. Again, I’m talking absolutely free here; it costs nothing to create a new outlook.com email address and a Microsoft account, which you can do in three minutes and unlock so many more features in Microsoft Copilot.
Since many of you watching my YouTube channel come from the business environment, I also wanted to talk a bit about Copilot with commercial data protection. What does commercial data protection actually mean? First of all, the data will not leak outside of the organization, and your user data will not be commingled with web data. With Copilot with commercial data protection, the conversations are not saved, and Copilot will not use any of the information you give it to train the AI model. When we interact with Copilot and use a free version of Copilot, either not signed in or signed in with a Microsoft account, let’s say I’m writing an amazing book on PowerShell and have a really great way to explain a few things. I’m really good at that, and I want to use Copilot to spell check. I’ll put my explanation of PowerShell inside Copilot and ask it to spell check. Copilot will spell check it for me, but if I’m on a free account, Copilot might say, “You know what, this is actually a great way to explain PowerShell. I haven’t seen that before.” Next time someone else asks it to explain PowerShell, it might use the explanation I gave it because when we use the free version of Copilot, it will use the data we give it and all the activities to train the AI model behind it. Of course, we do not want that with our company data. If you work on a recipe or an itinerary to travel to Montreal, it doesn’t matter, but you don’t want your employees to put sensitive company data, which is your most precious asset, your IP, into a consumer tool and use that data to train the AI model for everyone. This is where Copilot with commercial data protection comes in. It will not save any of the data behind; it will remain within your organization and will not be shared on the web. Conversations will not be saved, and the info will not be used to train the AI model. This is on by default and is included with Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 subscriptions, as well as business premium and business standard subscriptions. If you do not have those subscriptions, such as only having an Office 365 E3 or E5, there will be a standalone subscription available in the future for $5 per user per month if you are logged in with an eligible Azure AD account.
Let me show you how it looks. First, in my profile here, you can see that I am logged in with my personal account. It says “Vlad” at the top, and I have recent activity and plugins on my personal Microsoft account. But that’s it. Now, I go to my work account, where I’m logged in with my work email address. You see my company logo on the left, and I see a big “Protected” at the top right of the chat. I see “Protected” over here and “Protected” right above when I interact with Copilot. It says, “Your personal and company data are protected in this chat.” So, if you use Copilot with commercial data protection, you have this additional protection. But still, if you use Copilot personally, make sure that you are signed in with a Microsoft account to unlock all the functionality.
That was it for tip number one. Now let’s switch over to tip number two, which is to use good prompts. I mentioned the word “prompt” a few times already, but what does it mean? When we interact with Copilot, we use a prompt. Every single thing that you tell Copilot to do is a prompt. Prompts are simply how you ask Copilot to do something for you. It can be answering a question, creating an image, creating a blog post, writing some code—all of that is a prompt. Prompts are not unique to Microsoft Copilot; prompts are used in all artificial intelligence tools, or more specifically, in all generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Genesis by Google, and Microsoft Copilot. Prompts can be very simple, like “Write a blog post about sustainable practices in agriculture,” but a prompt can also be very detailed. For example, “Craft a 1500-word blog post for a general audience interested in sustainability, focusing on the significance and benefits of sustainable agricultural practices like organic farming and agroforestry. Include real-world examples, innovative technologies, and insights from reputable sources. Conclude with a reflection on the importance of those practices and a call for collective efforts to embrace them.” This is quite the prompt, with many details given to Copilot. The more details you give Copilot, the better the result you will get.
I want to emphasize that you do not need to be a prompt engineer to use Microsoft Copilot. However, knowing the best practices and understanding how Copilot thinks can help you get the expected results faster. To get better at prompting, let’s talk about the Microsoft prompt ingredients. Let’s take a look at an example prompt: “Generate a 1000-word blog post about artificial intelligence and its impact on marketing. The target audience is SEO experts who want to update their skills. Focus on getting information from scholarly articles and use as many concrete and real-life examples as possible.” This is a good prompt because it includes the four ingredients that Microsoft recommends. The first ingredient is the goal, which is clear: I want a 1000-word blog post about artificial intelligence and its impact on marketing. The second ingredient is the context: why do I need it and who is involved? My target audience is SEO experts who want to update their skills. The third ingredient is the source: which information sources or samples should Copilot use? Here, I’m telling it to focus on information from scholarly articles. Marketing is a field with a ton of different sources, from influencers to marketing experts to companies wanting to sell their products. I want this to focus only on scholarly articles. The fourth ingredient is the expectation: use as many concrete and real-life examples as possible. I’m sharing how Copilot should respond to best meet my expectations.
You don’t need to spend 15 minutes every single time you want to interact with Copilot to craft the perfect prompt, that goes against the whole idea of being more productive with artificial intelligence. But you do not always need all four. At the end of the day, the more details you give it, the better result you will get. So let’s try this prompt in action. The perfect prompt is: generate 10 multiple choice practice questions to prepare me for an intermediate level Office 365 exam at an interview, focusing on Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook only. So I’m telling you what is my context, and then I’m not giving it a source. I’m directly going to the expectation: each question should have four potential answers, and only one of them should be correct. Only tell me the correct answer at the end of all the questions. Now let’s imagine that this is what I wanted, but it’s not what I tell Copilot. So let me first just go and paste a very small version of it. So I’m telling it, let’s close this, generate 10 multiple choice practice questions to prepare me for an intermediate level Office 365 exam at an interview. I didn’t specify that I want Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, but it will give me something about Office 365. Let’s see what it ends up doing here. You see, I have a question on OneDrive for Business, for example. I have a question on IMAP, which is for Office 365 IT professionals. So you see, did it do what I wanted it to? Yes, it’s generating 10 multiple choice practice questions at an intermediate level. It did not give me what the correct answers are, which is kind of funny. Here I see some references, which I always recommend that you go take a look at, but it didn’t actually tell me what the correct answers are.
Now let’s copy a bit of a bigger part of the prompt. So let me take the same thing here. Let’s start a new topic and let’s say generate 10 multiple choice practice questions to prepare me for the exam. Each question should have four potential answers and only one of them should be correct. Now you see, I told it also to focus on Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook, but I didn’t tell it to only tell me the correct answer at the end of all the questions. So what it’s doing now is giving me the answer right away after each question. Now, of course, if I really wanted to not see the answer, it would be very difficult because now even if I try to, I will always see the answer. So again, this is just an example of how the prompt that you do, and especially for me, the goal, context, and expectation are the most important parts with Microsoft Copilot, will give you the best result. The more details that you add, the better result that you will get.
Something else I want to talk about is that with Copilot, we actually have three different conversation styles: more creative, more balanced, and more precise. This will greatly affect the type of answer that we get from Copilot. So what do they mean? When should we use each one of them? First of all, for more creative, you should use this conversation style when you want Copilot to give you elaborate and imaginative responses, presenting information in a more extensive and creative manner. So if you’re looking for creating a story, if you’re looking at imagining ideas, creating something that is not real, creative is perfect for you. On the other end of the spectrum, we have more precise. More precise is perfect if you want concise and direct answers that deliver information in a straightforward manner. This is the one that I personally use the most because it’s to the point, it’s exactly what I want it to be, and it will not try to be creative in the answers. It will just give me the answer. And then we have the balanced option, which is a blend of both creative and precise conversation styles. It offers responses that really strike a balance between providing comprehensive information and maintaining brevity.
You can always include those as part of your prompt. Remember the expectation ingredient; you can include those in there. But with the Compose tab in the Edge sidebar, you have them directly here as options, so your prompt will be easier to write.
Okay, let’s take a look at some examples. Now, if I open up this blog post over here as an example, you see it’s quite a long blog post. It talks about quite a few things here. What I can do instead is open Copilot in the Edge sidebar and simply ask it to summarize this page for me. Now, it will take a few seconds for Copilot to do it. Let me zoom in a bit more to make sure that you see properly. You see, it’s able to access the content of the web page to give me a summary of the most important things talked about in this blog post. If you have a PDF document open, that also works. So you see, this is a lot shorter, and I even have, for example, the references on where it got certain parts from. That is pretty awesome.
Now, another way that I can use Copilot in Edge is I can use Copilot in Edge here. Let’s start a new conversation. Here’s a blog post that was done on CISIT about a video that I recently did with Drew Matong, one of my good friends. They also did a blog post around it. As a tech evangelist, I need to create some socials about the content I create, of course, to let everybody know about it. I can go here and ask Copilot to create three social posts for Twitter to promote this blog post. There we go. Because I am on the page, Copilot has access to all of the content on the page. It can see what the blog post is about, who the authors are, and even if there are any social media accounts mentioned. For example, does the blog post mention the social media accounts of the authors? There we go. Look how awesome it is here. You see, it says, “Do you know what orphan workspaces are and how to tame them? Watch this video by Vlad Catafesco and Drew Matong.” It was able to get our social profiles and then add them in the tweet. This can make your life a lot easier.
Something else that is super, super cool is that you can go on a YouTube video. Let me start a new conversation again. By the way, you should start new conversations if you change topics. This way, Copilot doesn’t keep some of the old stuff in memory when you change subjects, which can influence future results. Here, I have a nice video that I did with Liberty Munson on my channel. The video, as you can see, is 36 minutes long. I can simply ask Copilot to summarize this video for me. It will go take a look at the transcript, which is on the page. It will understand the transcript and then create a summary for me.
Now, of course, can I do that with Copilot in Chrome? Yes, but I would have to copy all the transcript and then give it inside the prompt and then ask it for a summary. With Copilot in Edge, I am able to really just be on the page, and Copilot can use the context on the page, which is simply amazing. There we go. Here we have a beautiful summary that I can read. You see, it even goes at around what time we talk about every single subject so that is pretty awesome great so that’s it for tip number three.
Now let’s talk about tip number four: keep it conversational. Copilot will not get things right on the first try, and it might be because Copilot doesn’t get it right or your prompt is not exactly what you wanted. You might realize after that you wanted something different. So whether it’s images or text, keep asking Copilot to reiterate and give you alternatives. Copilot is free; it doesn’t cost you anything to keep talking with it, so don’t stop until you get the results you want. For example, if I go to Copilot and ask it to create an image of a dog behind a microphone, let’s close Copilot in the Edge sidebar and give it a few seconds. It should be able to create a nice image for me. There we go, your image is generating. Let’s see what it’s actually creating. There we go, it created a dog behind a microphone. It’s awesome, but you know what? That’s not exactly what I wanted. I want the dog to be a golden retriever. Let’s do that. So I’m keeping the conversation going with Copilot. I’m just telling it, “Hey, you know what? I didn’t give you the right input the first time. I actually wanted a golden retriever, not another type of dog, which I think this is a beagle judging by the ears.” There we go, now I have a golden retriever behind the microphone. That is awesome. Make the background a field of flowers. There we go, let’s try a final one. As you can see, I am keeping the conversation going. Even if my first prompt was not perfect, it did not include the ingredients that I wanted, the context, the details that I maybe should have included. I’m still able to keep the conversation going, and now I have a happy golden retriever in a field of flowers. Isn’t that awesome? So that was tip number four. Now, probably the most important one, tip number five: always check for accuracy. Copilot can and will make mistakes. Copilot is not perfect because it is trained on all the data on the internet. For Copilot to be perfect, you would assume that people are perfect, and we’re not perfect. There are so many things on the internet that are wrong, there are so many things on the internet that are outdated. For example, I asked Copilot, “What are 10 things that Slack can do that Microsoft Teams cannot?” Even from the first few things that it added, some of them were absolutely wrong. Is it Copilot’s fault? Not really, because Copilot looks on the internet, and if 10 people say that Teams cannot do something and Slack can, it will look at that answer and say, “Hey, everybody says that Slack can do something that Teams cannot,” so it will add that in the answer for Vlad. To finish it up in a funny way, can Copilot predict the future? I’m recording this video now 30 minutes before the Super Bowl has started, and I asked Copilot who won Super Bowl 58. It looks like either Copilot knows something we don’t, or Copilot is just wrong because it hallucinates. So, very, very important: always check for accuracy. Finally, before we’re done, this video ended up being quite long. I really hope it was valuable, but if you want to get more training on how to be more productive with artificial intelligence, check out my training on Pluralsight. There’s already a few hours of content out there, and there will be lots more hours of content in the next few days on full training on how to use Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, Copilot in Power Platform, Copilot in Teams, all of the different Copilot. If you want to be more productive with AI, there is no better resource out there than Pluralsight on this. Thank you so much for listening to this video. I really hope that what I shared with you was valuable and you were able to learn something from it. If you have enjoyed this video and want to stay up to date with the latest news on Copilot tips and tricks and everything Microsoft 365 and Power Platform, please like the video and subscribe to the channel. Thank you very much again for watching the video.
