Outlook

- [Instructor] Copilot in Outlook can help you do anything from compose new email messages from scratch, reply to emails you receive, or review lengthy threads that have been forwarded to you for key takeaways. And as we know by now, the way you compose your prompts is important if you want the best results. Let's say for example that I'm a manager and I need to let my team know that annual review time is approaching and they need to complete their self reviews. In Outlook, we'll click the New Mail button. You can then either click the Draft with Copilot link that appears in the message body area, or if you've already clicked in there and the link has disappeared, you can go to the Copilot button in the message ribbon, and then choose Draft with Copilot from here. And that gives us the Draft with Copilot box. So let's first try a basic prompt, like, "Tell my employees that they need to complete their self reviews." I'll click Generate. And after a few seconds, Copilot has composed a draft of the message force. Now, this actually isn't too bad considering how little we provided in the prompt. It says, "This is a reminder that you need to complete your self reviews by this Friday, October 15th. The self reviews are an important part of your performance evaluation and career development. Please use the online portal to submit your self reviews and follow the guidelines you provided. If you have any questions or issues, please contact me as soon as possible. Thank you for your cooperation and hard work." So again, not too bad, but there aren't really any details in here that I want to include. And in fact, a lot of this will have to be changed, because the information is inaccurate. So let's click Discard so we can start fresh. I'll click Copilot, Draft with Copilot again, and this time I'll include more details. "Let my team know that annual reviews will once again be held in July this year, and that they should have their self reviews completed and submitted by June 15th, and that the tools to help them write the reviews are available on our company Sharepoint." And I'll click Generate. And there it is. And this version includes pretty much everything I want to include in the email. It says, "I'm writing to inform you that annual reviews will once again be held in July this year. Self reviews should be completed and submitted by June 15th, and to use the tools available on the company Sharepoint." It also adds a line about the tools helping you highlight your achievements and challenges and goals for next year. Now, you may be thinking the prompt I wrote is almost as long as the email Copilot created, so why not just write the email myself? Well, the great thing about composing emails with Copilot is that you can have it draft multiple versions with different lengths and tones. I'll come down here and click the Edit prompt button. So, for example, maybe I want a longer version of this email. I'll click Make it Longer. And now we have this. Or maybe I want a more formal-sounding version. And now we have this version. So from that single prompt, I was able to generate three different drafts that I can choose from. And as we've seen in other apps, in the Copilot window we can jump between these versions by clicking the arrows. And once you have a version that you like, click Keep it. And now we have a good starting point for my email to work with and further customize as necessary. All right, let's look at another example. Copilot's ability to summarize emails can help you quickly get caught up on your messages. You can have Copilot summarize single emails to give you the important points or even long threads to help you understand what information or tasks you need to be aware of. For example, here we're looking at an email from Pedro to Kim where he is forwarding Kim this long exchange between him and Aya discussing issues that have come up on the project that they're all working on. And Pedro is asking Kim to provide her insight into these issues. Now, there's a lot to read here. A good way for Kim to jump in and get her bearings is to come up to the top of the thread. And when you have any email selected, you'll see this Summary by Copilot option here at the top. I'll click that and Copilot will scan the entire discussion looking for and identifying key points and then create a summary. And the summary now appears at the top of the thread detailing the key points. Now, depending on the nature of the email and the summary, this might be all you need to compose a thoughtful reply. But as always, you'll want to at least skim through the discussion and see if there's anything important that Copilot might have missed. And of course, you can also use Copilot to compose your reply. I'll click the Reply button. Notice down here at the bottom, we have this Draft with Copilot area, and we have a couple of suggested prompt options here. For example, I could choose Acknowledge challenges, suggest meeting, and now Copilot is creating a draft of my reply. Here it is. And now we should be pretty familiar with how this works. If we wanted to make any changes, we could type in this field here. We can click the Edit prompt button to make it longer or shorter or more casual. We can use the arrows to browse our different drafts, and I can click Keep It. And now we can use what Copilot has generated as the starting point for the reply.