Copilot Agentic Mode in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint: Co-create & Edit Like a Pro

Let's take a look at the agentic capabilities of Copilot in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. If you've been

underwhelmed by Copilot in those apps up until now, please watch this video. There is so much of a difference of what

we can do. The idea of agentic is that Copilot can now do things in these apps. So, we're no longer summarize this doc,

answer questions about that, even well beyond basically creating a single slide or creating a formula in PowerPoint. You

can use this, and I'm going to show you how I'm using it side by side in the apps to co-create and do things for you.

Trust me, it's worth it. And wait until the end because I'm going to show you one of the best hacks that will help you

get even more out of this. You can jump ahead to the app that you like or come with me on the whole journey and learn

some new tricks. Let's go. Let's start with Word. Once I've got Word open, you've got a Copilot icon down at the

bottom right here, and you'll see when that opens there is this allow editing option. That is where you want to be in

order to be able to use this agentic capability. If you want to switch back to just chatting side by side, select

that arrow and choose chat only. But we've been there, done that. We're going to have a look at the editing

capability. So, my scenario here is that I'm working with training engagements. People email me and say, "Hey, we'd like

to run some Copilot training for our organization. How does this work?" And what I'm going to do here is use the

agent capability to create a template for me and then also populate that template. So, what I'm doing here is

creating a workflow that is like an intake form of some kind. So, the first one I just wanted to show you is being

able to use this to create something from blank, but the value I get out of it is

actually more the editing and working with things that are partly done. So, we're going to go through a couple of

different things. So, my first prompt here is that I want it to create a templated table of some kind. And you'll

see as it creates this on the side of the screen that it comes up in this pale blue sort of color because I'm in

control about whether I want it or not, and then I can choose to say yes, I want to accept that or not. So we've got the

contact details organizing organ training topic preferred format. Okay. So all of this is fine, but this is a

bit much. So what we're going to do is say simplify to just

uh let's say five core rows and then expand then expand contact details so that

uh name, company, role title email and phone are separate rows. Okay. So now what I'm doing is

asking it to make an edit. And this is something that even if you didn't start from creating it in the first place, any

Word document you've got, you can ask Copilot on the side to make these change it and edit for you. How good is this?

So now we've got name, company, role, email, phone, and then training audience, goal. Right. So we're now down

to sort of a nice core intake form. And I'm going to select done. It's giving me a little bit extra here, but I don't

want that, so we'll just get rid of that. And then I can go ahead and save that as my training template.

All right, we've got our template. If you're watching closely, you might notice that I've deleted email and phone

there. It's just easier for demo purposes to do it that way. So what I've got here now is an email that has come

in from somebody describing what they want in terms of training. And you'll see that it's all quite unstructured.

There's a list of text and things here, and there are key pieces of information that I need to be able to extract from

this email in order to fill this form. So if you've got any kind of workflow that involves taking something like

this, a structured table, and filling it from You can do it from a PDF, from an unstructured email, then this is how you

can do that. So, what we can do here is come across and say "Fill this form." I'm going to misspell a little bit

there. Using And then I'm going to use that forward slash key to bring up the recent documents that I've been working

with. You can see that we've actually got emails, Word documents, Excel files, all sorts of things in here. But, what

you can actually do if you want to find a specific thing is start typing it. So, this one was training request, and there

it is. So, I'm just going to select that, hit enter, and watch it go. And what

it's going to do is read through that email and fill all of that information into the form. Now, I could also ask it

to remove that information to collect column once we're done, because we don't necessarily need that to be there.

We'll give it a second here. So, this is going to come through. See, it's actually even reformatting it as it

goes, filling in all of the details. Looking good so far. Again, in the blue, so I've got the option to

decide whether I'm ready to keep it when it's done. Excellent. So, you can see that I can use that edit mode to create

things from scratch or to populate things from other content, or I could type other things in there like remove

that column or change anything else around. Completely able to edit in natural language in Word. Let's take a

look at something a little more complex. I've got here a fictional statement of work, which is for training services for

a company that just wants AI for finance training services. And so, you'll see here that we have got a scope of work

that talks about AI for finance. So, let's say this company said, "Actually, we would also like to extend this to our

sales team." So, what I'm going to do is say the client now wants the same for their sales team, and then we can extend

extend the end date to 31st of July, because we're going to extend this. So, you'll see here this goes through to the

20th of June. So, we're going basically going to expand it. So, you'll see what happens here is the scope of work AI for

finance. As it goes through, it will work through the whole document and make changes. So, if you do something like

this, you'll see it making the changes as it works through each one. So, we can see we've got some changes up here. So,

first of all, it has changed finance and sales. So, it's edited that in there. It has now put in the new

date, the new scape of scope of work AI for finance and sales. And so, we've got all of those things in there. Now, it's

mixed it up a little bit. So, we can go through and ask it to sort of make it separate into different sections. But

again, you'll see how sophisticated this is. This isn't just like a search and replace to go through and say, "Oh, at

change finance to finance and sales." which is what you could do before all of this. But I'm asking it to understand

the content of the document and go through and actually make all of those changes. And you'll see that it's made a

bunch of different edits that you can go through. So, it's even changed that heading at the top there. And I would go

through and check all of those things and say it's done. So, this is something that mimics real things that I'm doing

where I need to make changes that are almost repetitive or that I can describe. And the amount of time it

takes to do it here compared to actually going through and editing and making all those changes myself is amazing. So, any

other workflow you've got like that where you want to populate documents or change things or rewrite things, you can

do that in here. The other very cool thing that you can do is edit just a part of the document. So, let's say I

take that part and say, "Rewrite this as an executive summary." Now, you'll notice I've just said rewrite this. It

knows what this is because it is completely contextually aware of where your cursor is and what you've got

highlighted on the screen. So, if you've been using Copilot in Word before, we used to do this kind of on the canvas in

a little sort of sparkle icon, but this allows you to just work entirely side by side asking it to make changes, and if

you want to focus in on a specific area, it understands where you are in the document. It's pretty cool, huh? Let's

take a look at this agent mode in Excel. So, again, we open it from the Copilot icon at the bottom, and we're working in

this allow editing mode. You can switch back to the chat-only mode, but you don't prefer that. The first thing I'm

going to do is ask it to create a top 10 videos table based on different metrics. Now, you can ask it to do all sorts of

analysis and creating different types of dashboards. It does take a little while because I'm asking it to crunch a bunch

of data here and figure it all out for me. And so, you'll see what it does is actually goes through and kind of

understands the data first and suggests the different kinds of metrics that it might be able to work with. It is also

having a look at So, it's saying the first row in some tables is showing the summary. So, that's right. This row two

here has got a summary on it. So, that's something it needs to figure out. So, you'll find as you do this kind of thing

that it also does a bit of a cleanup and tidy up. If I ask it to do something, for instance, by month, then it will

take that column with the dates in it and do that conversion first so that it understands what it's working with.

Let me go away and [clears throat] pause this for a second, and then we'll show you the results. Okay, and here we go.

It has created these top 10 tables. Again, I can select done and confirm those are in there. We've got some nice

colored formatting in there as well. So, here's my top 10 by views, top 10 by impression, top 10 by watch time, top 10

by click-through rate, and by subscribers, and by engagement. So, honestly, it's taken all of these

different things and sliced and diced that in a whole lot of different ways, which is pretty cool. Now, we can go a

step further here. What I'm going to do is ask it to help me with a plan. Arrange the videos by topic based on the

title. So, I'm going to get it to kind of do something that's a little bit more language-driven here. Understand the

title and create a plan and forecast for growing the channel from 112, which is where we are at the time of recording,

to 200 by the end of this year. Let's see what it comes up with here. Now, when I've asked it to do this one, it's

actually come back me for some clarifying questions. I'm going to just expand this out a bit so I've got a bit

more ways to work with it. So, should I categorize videos based on keywords? Uh how many categories? So, I would like

to say range by topic using both keywords, product name,

and the type of video. So, e.g. new release or tutorial.

I'd like five to seven broad categories. Regarding the growth forecast, I post

once every 2 weeks, but recommend what is optimal. Oh, actually, then we're going to say, "Please factor in

higher traffic around Microsoft Build and Microsoft Ignite events." Now, I haven't answered

all of the other questions there. If I don't give it answers to everything, it will do the best it can based on what it

is, but I can kind of provide that additional input, which is something that you will have seen in the other

research model type parts of the platform. Again, let's give it a minute and see what it comes back with now.

Here's an interesting thing as it's working. It's starting to notice, have a look at what it's creating here, but

it's starting to notice the projections show a gap. Let me provide a realistic assessment. So, it's actually doing the

work and then going back over it and checking it and making corrections as it goes. All right, and it is done. We're

going to check that. It is what it's going to do here is give me a summary of all of the things that it's done. So,

it's categorized the video, it's done an analysis, it's done a growth plan, all of these things. Now, you'll notice that

I deliberately said Microsoft Build and Microsoft Ignite, but I didn't give it the dates. It's gone in and put those

things in there. And there we go. So, we've got the topic of

the category. We've also got a video type, so it's actually kind of sort of understood what I wanted there. We've

got a category, we've got the video type performance, the channel growth plan. So, I'm going to go away and review all

that and see if I can get to 200 by the end of the year. We'll see how well this dates or not. And if you are interested

in those announcements from Microsoft Build and Microsoft Ignite, make sure you subscribe to the channel.

Let's take a look at what we can do with this edit mode in PowerPoint. And honestly, Copilot in PowerPoint was one

of the things I used the least, and now this is something I'm using the most. I've got a slide here that I actually

created with Co-work. If you want to learn how to do that, I've got another video here. But once you've created that

slide or you've got a slide deck that you've already done some other way and you want to make changes to the

formatting of it, here is something that you can do. Give this an instruction to say, "Change this slide so that the

agenda is a simple numbered box rather than a list of all of these things." Now, if I was doing this from scratch

myself, I don't have the PowerPoint editing skills to do that. I would just create a new slide, I would create a

heading, I would add a numbered list of items, and I'd end up with a honestly fairly average-looking thing.

So, I'm finding that this experience knows how to do this a whole lot better than I do. So, let's give it a minute

and see what it does. The temptation to click around and make other changes is very real because you do have to wait

for it. If you don't want to sit and watch it, have something else on a different app to work on. I find if

you're trying to continue with editing the PowerPoint slide, if I come down here for instance and edited something

on this slide, it's probably fine. But if you start to rearrange the order of the slides, especially if you're saying

change this slide, then it will get confused and you'll get a weird result. So you do just have to kind of be

patient and then step away and come back to it. And there we go. How much better is that than what I could do? I mean,

maybe you don't know how terrible my PowerPoint skills are, but I would not have come up with a beautiful layout

that looks like that. Here's another scenario. Let's say you've got a slide deck and you need to add speaker notes

from somewhere else. This is the publicly available Microsoft fiscal year report. If I come in here and say create

speaker notes based on and now I've actually got a transcript of the meeting. So this is what the

transcript looks like. It is very much as you would expect, just like a text-based transcript. So it's

actually taking a great big long kind of transcript of a meeting and putting the speaker notes in there. So this could

work for you if you've got a PowerPoint deck, perhaps you're working through it with a team and discussing it in a

meeting and you've got the meeting transcript and you want to put it in there. So let's say I want key talking

points. It gives you these options sometimes of like give me a little bit of clarity of what it is you want and

you can put it in there. And what we'll find is it will go through and add those into each slide. And there you have it.

We've got the speaker notes on every single slide automatically done for us. My other favorite hack here, if you need

to share a presentation with someone and you want to remove your speaker notes, you can just go into Copilot and say

remove all speaker notes and it's done in about 10 seconds. Lots of manual work removed with this

stuff. And I did promise you a hack to get more out of all of this. I'm going to show you this one in Excel, but you

can do this anywhere. Ask Copilot what it's capable of doing. It knows more about how to use this stuff than you do.

So, if you ask it, what can you do for me in Excel? It's going to give you a heap of different options in here. Here

we go. It can create and edit tables, charts, and visualizations, formulas and calculations, and it actually even gives

you a set of example prompts to try. In the context of whatever Word document, spreadsheet, or PowerPoint deck you've

got open, you could actually say, what else can you help me with here? And let's see what it can do.

I hope you can see the amazing possibilities here. This is just getting better and better. Don't forget to give

this video a like if you've got value out of it. If you'd like to know more about how to get the most out of

Copilot, you'll find my next video here. Thanks for watching.