Some examples of using Copilot 365 Business within Office 365

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Some examples of using Copilot 365 Business within Office 365
If you have paid for a Copilot 365 Business licence you will be able to summarise emails, work with OneDrive and Excel, analyse SharePoint lists and post to your Teams calendar (and much, much more).

Posted by Andy Brown on 13 May 2026

In this blog

An Outlook example
Working with OneDrive and Excel
A SharePoint example
A Teams example

This blog shows a few examples of how you can use Copilot 365 Business to work with OneDrive, Excel, Outlook, Teams and SharePoint.

At the time of writing a 365 Business licence is not sufficient for using Copilot within all of the Microsoft 365 cloud applications - you'll also need a separate Copilot 365 Business licence for some of the examples below, which you will need to pay for annually, not monthly. I've attempted to demystify Copilot licensing here.

An Outlook example

Out of all the 365 apps, Outlook is the one which lends itself most obviously to Copilot help:

My list of emails on the left, and the Copilot screen on the right.

Here's the prompt I've typed in:

Summarise my unread inbox emails in a table containing 3 columns with the following titles:

Sender

Subject

Description

The description should be a summary of the purpose of the email in not more than 30 words.

Finish by telling me which email you think I should answer first (ie which is the most urgent).

This is a really useful thing to be able to do. Here are the results:

If my emails on this test account had been more interesting, this would be useful!

Finally Copilot will advise me on which email it thinks I should answer most urgently:

I suspect this is a test flow created as part of a Power Automate course, but Copilot isn't to know this.

Working with OneDrive and Excel

My OneDrive root folder contains a file called Movies.xlsx which is a workbook containing 3,700 films, some of which have humorous reviews assigned to them:

The start of the (long) list of films.

What I'm going to ask Copilot to do is to open the workbook from OneDrive, analyse the reviews, find the 5 funniest and list these in a separate worksheet in the same workbook:

My OneDrive "My files" folder contains an Excel workbook listing out films. Each film has a review against it.

Create a new worksheet in this workbook called "Funniest", and in it list out the 5 films with the funniest reviews, using your subjective opinion to determine what "funniest" means.

Copilot shows me its results, and asks if I want to add the new worksheet to the workbook:

I thought I'd already asked Copilot to do this, but hey ho.

I tried asking Copilot to add the worksheet several times, but in each case ended up with this message:

I suspect that Copilot is blocking access to the file it opened, but that's only a guess.

I'm going to assume that this is user error on my part!

A SharePoint example

We don't have any meaningful data in our SharePoint sites (we use them for training purposes only), so I'll try a fairly generic prompt:

Summarise the contents of my SharePoint sites.

I happened to be within OneDrive when I typed this in. Here is a part of the results:

Like I said, we don't use SharePoint in anger!

I thought I'd zoom in on one of the SharePoint sites:

For the SharePoint site called:

Delegate 78 - SharePoint

Please summarise any lists that it contains.

I got this:

This is fun! I presume I could now drill down further ...

What is strange is that while you can interrogate SharePoint sites in this way, within SharePoint itself I can't see the Copilot icon. This could be because our tenant isn't configured to allow this, but research suggests that it's more likely that this feature hasn't yet been rolled out yet to production sites.

A Teams example

I'll finish with one of the most useful things that you can do in Copilot: automate things you do in Teams. Let's start with adding an appontment to discuss cat videos with my good friend Delegate71:

Please add an appointment for me in my Teams calendar for 3pm tomorrow to discuss the sharing of cat videos in work time with Delegate71.

Copilot offers a reassuring level of detail and confirmation: