Where Copilot actually lives
There's no single "open Copilot" moment. It shows up in several places, and it helps to know which is which before you start.
- Inside an app (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams): a Copilot icon opens a side pane docked next to what you're working on. It already knows which document, email or meeting is open, so it can act on it directly: "summarise this," "rewrite the second paragraph," "build a formula for this column."
- Standalone Copilot Chat (in Teams, on the web at copilot.cloud.microsoft, or the Microsoft Copilot mobile app): a general purpose chat window, separate from any one document, closer to how you'd use Claude's own chat.
- Each surface keeps its own conversation history. A chat you start in Word doesn't carry into standalone Copilot Chat, and vice versa.
Talk to it like a sharp colleague
Copilot performs best with full sentences and real context, not keyword fragments. Compare these two:
Vague: "summarize this"
Useful: "Summarize this email thread in five bullet points, focused on what the client is asking us to change, and flag anything with a deadline. Write it so I can paste it straight into a status update for my manager."
Same document, same tool, very different answer. The second version tells Copilot what to focus on, what shape you want the answer in, and who it's for, exactly the kind of context it can't infer from the file alone. This is the whole skill in one example: be specific about the focus, the format, and the audience, and Copilot stops guessing.
It doesn't stop at the first message either. Say Copilot answers with all five bullets, but two of them read too formally for a quick internal update. A natural follow-up gets you the rest of the way: "Keep the five bullets, but make the tone more casual, like you're updating a teammate rather than writing a memo, and cut the second bullet to one line." Copilot revises what it already wrote rather than starting over, the way a colleague would edit a draft instead of writing a fresh one from scratch. That's the habit worth building: send a clear first message, then treat what comes back as a draft to steer rather than a final answer to accept or reject whole. Most of Copilot's best answers come from that second or third message, not the first.
Keeping it tidy
Copilot Chat saves and lists your conversations the same way Claude does. You can rename a chat from the menu next to its title so it's easy to find later ("Q3 client renewal," not "New chat 14"), and the Chats list on the left keeps a running record so you don't need to keep a thread open just in case. Two small habits pay off early: rename anything you'll come back to, and don't be afraid to abandon a chat that went nowhere; nothing forces you to keep using it.
One topic per chat
Copilot, like most chat-based AI, reads back over the whole conversation every time you send a message. Starting a fresh chat for a new topic keeps answers sharp. Reusing one long-running Copilot Chat for unrelated questions makes responses vaguer over time, as older, irrelevant messages dilute the context.
Try it
Pick an email or document you're currently working on. Open Copilot in that app and ask for something specific: a summary with a particular focus, a first draft of a reply, a table pulled from the text. Then send one follow-up refining it ("make it shorter," "more formal tone," "add a line about next steps") and notice how the second answer builds on the first. Rename the chat before you close it, so you can find it again next week.