Getting Copilot set up

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First impressions of Copilot within Office 365 Part two of a five-part series of blogs
You can now add Copilot to your 365 licence, although it isn't cheap - this review looks at whether the benefits outweigh the costs. Using Copilot within Microsoft 365 Getting Copilot set up (this blog) Examples of using Copilot for Excel Using Copilot withn Outlook Using Copilot with Word and PowerPoint

First impressions of Copilot within Office 365

Part two of a five-part series of blogs

You can now add Copilot to your 365 licence, although it isn't cheap - this review looks at whether the benefits outweigh the costs.

Posted by Andy Brown on 08 May 2024

In this blog

Obstacle 1 - Paying Microsoft
Obstacle 2 - Autosaving to OneDrive
Obstacle 3 - Generating a Table

This page lists the obstacles that you'll need to overcome to use Copilot in Excel and other 365 apps.

Obstacle 1 - Paying Microsoft

The first thing you'll need to do is to subscribe to Copilot. To do this, you'll first need to have a business licence to use Microsoft 365 (if you're not a business, then for now you won't be able to use Copilot - sorry!):

Type of customer	Licence needed
Enterprise	Microsoft 365 E3, E5, F1, F3, or Office 365 E1, E3, or E5
Business	Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Business Standard, or Business Premium
Education	Microsoft 365 A3 or Microsoft 365 A5 for faculty

In practice this means that you must have a 365 licence, which most readers of this blog will:

If you see something like this in Excel when you choose File -> Account from the menu, you've cleared the first hurdle.

On top of this you'll then need to take out a Copilot for Microsoft 365 licence, which will cost $360 plus VAT for the first year (to give an idea, it cost Wise Owl £296.40 at the prevailing rate of exchange on May 8th 2024).

Don't be misled by this claim from Microsoft's Copilot pricing page - this figure excludes tax, and you can't pay monthly!

Obstacle 2 - Autosaving to OneDrive

Once you've got a Copilot licence this icon should pop up in Excel, for example:

If you've got this ribbon icon on your Home tab in Excel, you're good to go - just about.

When you click on the Copilot icon you may well see a message like this:

You need to turn AutoSave on to use Copilot.

But this is a bit sneaky, because you'll then see this message:

Beneath this you'll see a list of available OneDrive accounts. So what MIcrosoft really mean is that you need to save the file to OneDrive, which is fair enough I guess.

You should then see a message like this:

As with everyting to do with Excel online, you need to create a table to get anything useful out of your workbook using Copilot.

Obstacle 3 - Generating a Table

To use Copilot in Excel, you need to store your data in tables:

Select any cell in a rectangular block of data and select the icon show on the Insert tab of the ribbon to turn it into a table (you can often also press Ctrl + T to do this, although it doesn't work in all browsers).

You can then confirm the location of your table and choose OK:

If your data is in a well-defined block, Excel should always guess the range location correctly.

You should then give this table a more sensible name:

By default the first table will be called Table1, but you can rename it as shown on the Table Design tab of the ribbon.

The rest of this blog assumes that you have created a table for each worksheet containing data in your workbook.

Parts of this blog
Using Copilot within Microsoft 365 Getting Copilot set up (this blog) Examples of using Copilot for Excel Using Copilot withn Outlook Using Copilot with Word and PowerPoint

Some other pages relevant to the above blogs include:

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Obstacle 1 - Paying Microsoft

Obstacle 2 - Autosaving to OneDrive

Obstacle 3 - Generating a Table

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