Draft your content using Microsoft Copilot

Drafting effective content—whether it's a report, email, or presentation—often requires balancing clarity, structure, and creativity. With Copilot integrated into Microsoft 365, you can streamline the drafting process and elevate the quality of your work.

Copilot assists at every stage of content creation. It helps you organize your ideas, refine your language, and ensure your message is clear and impactful. By providing intelligent suggestions, Copilot enables you to quickly generate outlines, draft content, and polish your drafts with professional phrasing and formatting.

Using Copilot, you can:

• Start with a prompt or a few key points and let Copilot build out a structured draft.
• Receive real-time feedback and suggestions to improve tone, clarity, and coherence.
• Incorporate relevant data, references, or organizational knowledge into your content.
• Iterate rapidly, making adjustments based on Copilot's recommendations until your document meets your goals.

Whether you're drafting from scratch or revising existing material, Copilot empowers you to work more efficiently and confidently. The result is well-crafted content that communicates your ideas effectively and meets the standards of your organization.

Draft new content in Word

Starting a new document can often feel daunting, especially when you're unsure how to begin. With Copilot in Word, you can generate a first draft that sets the direction for your content.

How to use Copilot to draft content

Open Word and select the Copilot icon on the Home ribbon to open Copilot. Note that you can select work-grounded or web-grounded resources as you interact with Copilot.

• Work-grounded data refers to internal organizational content—such as emails, documents, meetings, and chats—accessible through your Microsoft 365 environment.
• Web-grounded data draws from public internet sources via Bing search. It's ideal for external research, discovering trends, and generating content based on up-to-date information beyond your organization's internal repositories.

The chat interface for work-grounded data presents suggested prompts that allow you to ask questions based on the open document's context. Alternatively, you can enter prompts such as:

• Write a professional introduction for our Q3 performance report.
• Make the tone more optimistic and forward-looking.
• Add a sentence that highlights our team's achievements.

Remember that a key to getting the best responses from Copilot is to iterate on your prompts. You can use follow-up prompts to adjust tone, length, or focus.

Copilot in Word can also automatically include citations in your drafted content. When Copilot draws from your work files or web sources to generate text, it can add references inline—helping you produce more credible documents without manual source-tracking.

Copilot can also refine content you've already written. Select any text in your document and describe the change you need:

• Rewrite this in a more formal tone for a leadership audience.
• Make this paragraph more concise—aim for two sentences.
• Simplify this for a non-technical reader.

Include industry trends: choose the right grounding—web vs. work

As you draft your report, you realize it would be valuable to include a paragraph on current industry trends. You aren't sure if this information already exists in your organization's files or if you need to pull it from the web. Copilot in Word helps you with both.

• Use work-grounded prompts

  Prompt example: Summarize recent internal insights about wearable tech trends from my documents and emails. Copilot searches your organization's content and generates a summary based on what's available to you.

• Use web-grounded prompts

  Prompt example: Summarize current trends in the wearable tech industry using recent web sources. Copilot pulls in publicly available information from trusted web sources for a broader perspective.

Try both types of prompts to see how the responses differ and how you can combine them for richer content.

Derive insights with Work IQ

Because Work IQ reasons about your role, your relationships, and how your organization's knowledge connects, it can surface insights that a simple file search would miss. Instead of only searching for documents by keyword, you can ask Copilot to reason across the people and patterns behind your work.

Try prompts like:

• Who else on my team has recently written about wearable tech trends?
• What related documents or conversations exist from people I collaborate with on this project?
• Summarize what my department has focused on this quarter.

If your organization connects external systems through Copilot connectors, Work IQ can extend these insights even further. For example, if Salesforce is connected, you could ask Summarize my open opportunities for the Contoso account, and Copilot returns a summary grounded in that Salesforce data alongside your Microsoft 365 content.

Review Work IQ–driven insights the same way you review any Copilot response: confirm the people, documents, and records referenced are relevant and current before you use them in your report.

Convert text to a table in Word

Once you draft your introduction and include industry trends, you want to present your team's performance metrics in a clear, visual way. You can use Copilot to convert a block of text into a table.

How to use Copilot to create tables

1. Select the paragraph you want to convert.
2. Select Visualize as a Table, or in the Chat pane prompt: Convert this paragraph into a table with columns for team name, KPI, and result.
3. Refine formatting with follow-up prompts: Add a header row and bold the column titles.
4. Save your document when you're happy with the draft.

You're well on your way to meeting your deadline. Now, you need to consider how to present your report to leadership.

Create a PowerPoint presentation from a Word document

Transforming your Word document into a PowerPoint presentation is a strategic way to communicate your report's insights to leadership. With your content drafted, it's time to prepare for the upcoming leadership meeting. You need to turn your Word content into a compelling presentation—another task that Copilot can help you streamline.

How to use Copilot to draft content in PowerPoint

1. Open PowerPoint and access Copilot by selecting the Copilot icon on the Home ribbon.
2. Reference up to five files to inform your presentation. To reference a file, start your prompt with a slash (/) followed by the file name (/Word_Document_Example.docx). You can reference Word documents, PDFs, Excel files, or text files to draw from multiple sources at once.
3. Prompt: Summarize this content into five bullet points for a leadership presentation. If the bullet points don't best highlight the content, you can refine the prompt for better results.
4. Refine with: Make the bullets concise and action-oriented.
5. Select a slide and prompt Copilot to generate an original image—for example, Create an image of a diverse team collaborating in a modern office or Generate an icon that represents customer growth. Copilot produces a few options to choose from, and you can refine the result with follow-up prompts such as Make the background lighter or Use a flat icon style instead.
6. Once your slide deck is complete, save the file.

The same image generation is available in Word, so you can add a matching visual to your report without leaving the document. For a more polished, standalone visual—like a banner or social post—use Create instead.

For more information, see Build effective presentations with AI.

Review and refine an existing presentation

Copilot in PowerPoint can also help you work with a deck you've already built. Open a presentation and use the Copilot pane to ask questions, get a summary of key points, or request changes:

• Summarize the deck — prompt Copilot to give you an overview of the presentation's main themes
• Ask targeted questions — for example, Which slides need more supporting data? or What are the key takeaways from this deck?
• Add or expand content — ask Copilot to add a new topic with consistent styling, or to expand a slide with more detail

Design polished visuals and video with Create

For a project banner, social post, or promotional graphic, Copilot Create gives you a dedicated space to design polished content instead of a quick inline image. Select Create in the Microsoft Copilot app, then choose what you want to build—an image, banner, poster, video, or more—starting from a text description or a template.

Try prompts like:

• Create a banner for our monthly team newsletter with a modern design and the title "Monthly Updates."
• Create a LinkedIn post announcing our Q3 results with a professional tone and our company logo in the header.

If you'd rather turn an existing report into a video, choose Create a video and upload your Word document or PowerPoint file. Copilot writes a script, adds narration, and organizes your content into scenes, giving you a ready-to-edit project instead of a blank timeline.

You can start a design on the web and finish it later on mobile or in the desktop app.

Communicate progress with your leadership team in Outlook

After you complete your document and presentation, you need to let your leadership team know the current status. Copilot in Outlook helps you both draft new messages and work with existing email threads.

Draft a new email from scratch

When you need to send an update, announcement, or meeting request, Copilot can generate a complete draft from a single prompt. Open a new email, select the Copilot icon in the message toolbar, and describe what you need:

• Draft an email to my manager announcing completion of the Q3 performance report.
• Write a meeting request to the leadership team for a 30-minute Q3 review session.
• Compose a project update for stakeholders that highlights key milestones achieved this quarter.

Copilot generates a full draft you can review and refine before sending.

Summarize and draft from an email thread

Your team has had a lengthy conversation over email about the report, and you want to include a high-level overview of that conversation in your status email to leadership. Copilot in Outlook helps you summarize the thread first. Watch the following video to see how easy it is:

Copilot tutorial: Summarize an email

Once Copilot has summarized the thread, prompt it to Draft an email to the leadership team based on the summary of the email thread. Keep the tone professional and concise.

Improve your email before you send

Before sending, use Copilot's email coaching feature to get suggestions on tone, clarity, and reader sentiment. Select Get Coaching in the Copilot pane and Copilot reviews your draft and offers specific suggestions. You can choose which suggestions to apply individually—adjusting a single sentence, a phrase, or the overall tone—until the message lands as intended.

By following this workflow, you see how Copilot helps you move from drafting a report, to visualizing data, to building a presentation, and finally to communicating your progress, all within the apps you use every day. As you continue, remember that effective prompts and the right grounding (work or web) help you get the most out of Copilot in your daily workflow.

Validate content against your business goals

Before you share what Copilot helped you create, pause and check it against the outcome you actually need. A polished draft isn't useful if it doesn't serve its purpose.

Ask yourself:

• Audience fit: Does the tone, length, and level of detail match who's reading this—leadership, a client, or your team?
• Goal alignment: Does the content support the decision or action you need from your audience, not just describe the topic?
• Format fit: Is this the right deliverable—a document, a table, a slide, an email—for how your audience will use it?
• Accuracy: Have you checked the facts, figures, and citations Copilot included?

If a response falls short on any of these, refine your prompt or edit the draft directly rather than sending it as-is. Treat Copilot's output as a draft, not a final answer, so your business content stays both efficient to produce and reliable to share.

What if you need a more in-depth set of data to include in your presentation? The next unit discusses the Researcher agent, a prebuilt agent designed by Microsoft that allows you to gather and organize information from your work and the web to create detailed reports.