Welcome to the July 2024 edition of What’s New in Copilot for Microsoft 365! Every month, we highlight new features and enhancements for Copilot for Microsoft 365, to keep Microsoft 365 admins up to date with Copilot features that help your users be more productive and efficient in the apps they use every day.  And don’t miss the new monthly series designed to empower small and midsized businesses to harness the power of AI at work, Grow your Business with Copilot for Microsoft 365. 

Let’s take a closer look at what’s new this month: 

Admin and management capabilities:

Enable a Copilot adoption community in Viva Engage
Expanded availability of the Microsoft Copilot Dashboard
Mitigate oversharing risk with extended IT controls for SharePoint Advanced Management

User capabilities:

Turn prompt inspiration into action with Copilot Lab
Enhance data understanding with Copilot in Excel
Craft and organize emails faster with Copilot
Improved document summarization in Copilot in Word
Create quizzes using Copilot in Forms
Improve centralized communications with Copilot in Viva Amplify Editor
Improvements based on your feedback

Enable a Copilot adoption community in Viva Engage

Network admins and corporate communicators can enable a Viva Engage community specifically built to support adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot. The Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption community makes it easier for your users to ask questions, seek support from peers and IT admins, and learn best practices for Copilot. The Copilot Adoption community is now generally available for Viva and Copilot customers. Learn more about how it works. 

A computer screenshot showing the Viva Engage page in Microsoft Teams, with highlighted actions for the button called Launch early adopters as well as the link to Apply adoption features to an existing community.

Expanded availability of the Microsoft Copilot Dashboard

The Microsoft Copilot Dashboard is now available as part of Copilot for Microsoft 365 licenses and no longer requires a Viva Insights premium license. We are now rolling out the Microsoft Copilot Dashboard to Copilot for Microsoft 365 customers who have over 100 assigned Copilot licenses or 10 assigned premium Viva Insights licenses.  

With this update, the Copilot Dashboard now provides data for all Copilot license holders, providing greater visibility into adoption and impact at your organization. We’ve also streamlined admin controls for easier management and customization.  

A computer screenshot of the Microsoft Copilot Dashboard.

Mitigate oversharing risk with extended IT controls for SharePoint Advanced Management

Search and Copilot only return content to which users have permission, however, users may inadvertently be given access to more content than they need. SharePoint Advanced Management extends traditional IT controls for content and access governance in to help you manage your organization’s data. Beginning next month, content owners and creators will be able to better protect content through its lifecycle with these simple, powerful tools that help mitigate oversharing risk via both Search and Copilot. 

Data access governance reports are a collection of reports that help you discover SharePoint sites that contain potentially overshared or sensitive content, so you can assess and apply appropriate security and compliance policies. Our newest report reflects the latest state of permissions in the entire tenant to help identify sites that have a greater count of permissioned users than the number specified by the SharePoint admin. This feature is rolling out in August.

Site access review will help admins discover potential oversharing within their tenant. SharePoint admins will be able to request site owners to review permissions using the report’s specific context. Site owners will receive a corresponding email that redirects to a site that clearly displays the sharing and permissions, along with actions to take. This feature is rolling out in August.

Turn prompt inspiration into action with Copilot Lab

Copilot Lab empowers users to confidently start their AI journey and maximize the potential of Copilot in their daily tasks with curated prompts. Soon, with a simple click, users will be able to take any prompt from the Copilot Lab website and run the prompt in Copilot with Graph-grounding chat, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel by selecting the “Try in” button within each prompt card. This feature will begin rolling out in August.  

Users can visit Copilot Lab today to explore our latest prompt collection or check out Copilot Lab in their favorite Microsoft 365 apps or on mobile to get inspired right in the flow of work.  

Copilot Lab prompt card in the web experience featuring the ability to run a prompt in the designated app by selecting the “Try in” button.

Enhance data understanding with Copilot in Excel

Copilot in Excel helps users explore and understand data. Now, users can make sense of their data more easily with new features that enable previews of requested changes and support for complex conditional formatting. 

Now when users ask Copilot to make changes to table data, Copilot provides a description of the planned changes along with a button to apply the change, providing the user with more information to decide whether to proceed with the update. Users can refine changes and apply them when they’re ready. This feature is rolling out in July. 

An Excel worksheet with sales data where the user has asked Copilot to, ”highlight rows where Q1 and Q2 are more than Q3 and Q4” ” and Copilot has suggested a formula with a button to ”apply” which the user can click.

Conditional formatting can be particularly helpful for users when shaping a worksheet. Now, when users set a conditional format rule, Copilot can include a preview of the conditional formatting style that will be applied and a formula explanation when available. This feature is rolling out in July. 

We’ve also added more support for complex conditional formats, so users can ask Copilot to highlight rows or columns based on a combination of inputs. For example, to do this a user can prompt Copilot: “Highlight rows where ‘priority’ is ‘critical’ and ‘status’ is not ‘done’.” This feature is rolling out in July. 

An Excel worksheet where the user has asked Copilot to “highlight rows where there’s a sales lead but no territory listed” and Copilot has suggested a conditional formatting rule to review and apply.

Soon, users can ask Copilot to add a single formula to summarize column data into one cell. Currently, full column calculations produce a unique result in each row, but this new feature gives users the option to calculate all data in a column together to return one result. This feature is rolling out in July. 

An Excel worksheet with sales data where the user asked Copilot to “Calculate the total sales of products for 2021” and Copilot suggested a formula to review and apply.

Craft and organize emails faster with Copilot

Draft by Copilot is a feature to improve and simplify the process of drafting emails. Users can now ask Copilot to draft an email using the right-hand side chat by selecting the Copilot icon on the top right of the app. Copilot will recognize which email a user is reading, so they can prompt Copilot to help draft a response by asking something like, “Reply to this email confirming…” and Copilot will continue developing a draft in the compose window. Using the same chat experience, users can also ask Copilot to help organize email by using a prompt such as “Move all email from sales@contoso.com into my Sales folder.” Both features will roll out in July. 

Image shows the process when asking Copilot to draft an email using the right side pane chat inside Outlook

Improved document summarization in Copilot in Word

Now with Copilot in Word, users can summarize documents that contain up to 80,000 words (depending on language), about four times more words than Copilot was previously able to summarize. Learn more here. This feature is rolling out in July for web, desktop, and Mac. 

A 66-page Word document is open. The user clicks on the Copilot icon, the Copilot chat pane appears, and the user asks Copilot to “Summarize this doc”. A summary appears in the Copilot chat pane.

Create quizzes using Copilot in Forms

Copilot in Forms helps users quickly and easily create forms and surveys. Now, Copilot can help users create quizzes with correct answers based on their intents and inputs, making it perfect for teachers, trainers, or anyone looking to assess knowledge in an engaging and interactive way. This feature is rolling out in July. 

A computer screen showing a prompt window to draft with Copilot to create a quiz.

Improve centralized communications with Copilot in Viva Amplify Editor

We’re bringing the superpowers of Copilot directly into the Viva Amplify editing experience to revolutionize the way users create and enhance content by providing writing assistance for all communications. Users can simply click the Copilot icon for help with content, style, rewrites, and tone. Copilot in Viva Amplify will be available in preview in August.  

 A computer screenshot showing the Microsoft Viva page with a draft of an email being written to all managers.

Improvements based on your feedback

We continue to collect feedback from IT Pros and end users of Copilot for Microsoft 365. Thanks to your input, we have developed and rolled out many new capabilities and features over the last few months. 

You asked for better transcript management, and we rolled out improvements to the view, download, and delete experience of Teams meeting transcript files, explicit consent for transcription in Teams meetings when applied by policy, tenant-wide policy for permission to download meeting transcripts and user-level controls for who can view and edit meeting transcripts. 

You also asked for better summarization, and we rolled out summaries based on multiple emails, presentations and Teams chats, referencing multiple files, draft based on text, list, or table selection, support for complex formula columns from multiple tables in Copilot for Excel, and the ability to summarize content in Word with less than 200 words. 

In addition, other features we developed to address your feedback include Restricted SharePoint Search enables you to disable organization-wide search and select a set of curated SharePoint sites, and support for Immersive Reader in Word. 

Did you know? The Microsoft 365 Roadmap is where you can get the latest updates on productivity apps and intelligent cloud services. Please note that the dates mentioned in this article are tentative and subject to change. Check back regularly to see what features are in development or coming soon. 

​Microsoft Tech Community – Latest Blogs –Read More