Go from “AI-intimidated” to confidently using Copilot to save 1–2 hours every single day.
Artificial Intelligence is everywhere in the news, but separating marketing hype from what Microsoft 365 Copilot can actually do in your day-to-day work is the key to real productivity. This hands-on course cuts through the AI noise to deliver practical, grounded skills for business professionals who want results, not theoretical tech talk.
Participants will learn practical prompting techniques and discover how to use Copilot in Outlook, Teams, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel to save time, improve communication, simplify content creation, and gain quick insights from data. Through interactive demonstrations and guided labs, students will practice summarizing email threads and meetings, drafting professional communications, creating presentations, generating documents, and analyzing spreadsheet data using plain-English questions instead of complex formulas.
This course focuses on real-world business applications rather than technical concepts, making it ideal for professionals who want to build confidence using AI tools in a practical and responsible way. By the end of the course, participants will leave with immediately usable skills, a prompting cheat sheet, and strategies for incorporating AI into everyday workflows to improve efficiency and productivity.
Upon completion of this course, participants should be able to:
- Understand the capabilities of Microsoft 365 Copilot.
- Write effective prompts for better AI results.
- Improve and refine AI-generated responses.
- Summarize email threads using Copilot.
- Draft professional emails in Outlook.
- Use Teams Copilot to summarize meetings and action items.
- Generate documents in Microsoft Word with AI assistance.
- Rewrite and improve business content using Copilot.
- Create PowerPoint presentations from prompts or documents.
- Analyze Excel data using plain-English questions.
- Create charts, highlights, and summaries in Excel.
- Automate repetitive workplace tasks using Copilot.
- Apply Copilot tools across Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, and PowerPoint.
- Continue building AI productivity skills using Microsoft resources.
Module 1: The “Secret Sauce” of Talking to AI
Before clicking buttons in Word or Excel, beginners must learn how to “speak” to AI to prevent getting bad results.
- What is Copilot? A friendly introduction to your new digital assistant (and what it can and cannot do).
- The 4 Ingredients of a Perfect Prompt: Learning the simple formula to get great results on your first try (Goal, Context, Source, and Expectations).
- Fixing “Bad” Prompts: Interactive group session changing vague commands into highly effective prompts.
- Hands-on Lab: Log into the Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat app and practice a live brainstorming session.
Module 2: Conquering Your Inbox & Meetings
Focusing on the two biggest time-sinks for any business professional: messy email threads and long meetings.
- Outlook (Email Triage): How to ask Copilot to summarize a 20-email chain into 3 bullet points so you can catch up in seconds.
- Outlook (Drafting with Tone): Writing replies instantly while adjusting the tone (e.g., turning a blunt thought into a polite corporate email).
- Teams (Meeting Magic): How to catch up on a meeting you joined late, list action items, or summarize a discussion without re-watching the recording.
- Hands-on Lab: Students will use Copilot to summarize a mock email thread, draft a response, and pull action items from a simulated Teams meeting transcript.
Afternoon Session: Content Creation & Simple Insights
Module 3: Beating the “Blank Page” Syndrome (1:00 PM – 2:15 PM)
Moving into content generation. Beginners often struggle to start writing documents or presentations; Copilot handles the first draft.
- Word (First Drafts): Launching a document from scratch using a simple prompt or an existing set of scattered bullet points.
- Word (Editing & Polishing): Asking Copilot to rewrite a paragraph to sound more professional, concise, or persuasive.
- PowerPoint (Instant Decks): Creating a complete, multi-slide presentation using a Word document or a simple outline as the source.
- Hands-on Lab: Create a 1-page project proposal in Word, refine it with Copilot, and then instantly transform that document into a 5-slide PowerPoint presentation.
Module 4: Demystifying Data & Building the AI Habit (2:30 PM – 4:00 PM)
Excel can terrify beginners. We strip out complex formulas and focus purely on using natural language to read data.
- Excel (Data for Non-Data People): Asking basic questions about a spreadsheet using plain English (e.g., “Which product line made the most money in Q2?”).
- Excel (Visual Highlights): Instructing Copilot to color-code top performers, sort lists, and create basic charts without clicking menu buttons.
- Building an “AI Habit”: A closing strategy session on how to identify two repetitive tasks to delegate to Copilot tomorrow morning.
- Hands-on Lab: Open a basic sales spreadsheet, use Copilot to highlight the highest-selling region, generate a summary chart, and ask for three quick takeaways.
Wrap-Up & Open Q&A
- Troubleshooting common beginner roadblocks.
- Where to find the built-in Microsoft “Prompt Guide” for ongoing help.
- Distribution of a 1-page “Prompting Cheat Sheet” to keep at desks.
