What’s new in Copilot | July 2024

Welcome to the July 2024 edition of Copilot for Microsoft 365! Each month, we’ll highlight new and improved features in Copilot for Microsoft 365 to help Microsoft 365 admins stay up to date with Copilot’s capabilities that help people be more productive and efficient in the apps they use every day. And don’t miss our new monthly series designed to help small and midsize businesses harness the power of AI in the workplace. Grow your business with Copilot for Microsoft 365.

Let’s take a closer look at what’s new this month.

Management and administration features:

User Features:

Network administrators and enterprise communicators can enable the Viva Engage community, which is specifically built to support Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption. The Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption community makes it easier for users to ask questions, seek support from peers and IT administrators, and learn Copilot best practices. The Copilot Adoption Community is now generally available to Viva and Copilot customers. Learn more about how it works.

A computer screenshot showing the Viva Engage page in Microsoft Teams, with a highlighted action for the ‘Launch to Early Adopters’ button and a link to roll out the feature to your existing community.

Expanded availability of the Microsoft Copilot dashboard

The Microsoft Copilot dashboard is Available Now It is now available as part of the Copilot for Microsoft 365 license and no longer requires a Viva Insights Premium license. We are now rolling out the Microsoft Copilot dashboard to Copilot for Microsoft 365 customers with 100 or more assigned Copilot licenses or 10 assigned Premium Viva Insights licenses.

With this update, the Copilot dashboard now provides data on all Copilot license holders, giving you greater visibility into adoption and impact across your organization. We’ve also streamlined administrator controls for easier management and customization.

A computer screenshot of the Microsoft Copilot dashboard.

Mitigate Oversharing Risks with Extended IT Controls for SharePoint Advanced Management

Search and Copilot only return content that users have permission to, but users can accidentally access more content than they need. Help manage your organization’s data by extending existing IT controls for content and access governance. Starting next month, content owners and creators can more effectively protect their content throughout its lifecycle with these simple, powerful tools that help mitigate oversharing risks through Search and Copilot..

A collection of reports to help you discover SharePoint sites with potentially overshared or sensitive content, so you can assess and enforce appropriate security and compliance policies. The latest reports reflect the latest permissions status for the entire tenant, helping you identify sites with more users with permissions than the SharePoint administrator specifies. This feature will be available in August.

Helps administrators spot potential oversharing within their tenants. SharePoint administrators can use the specific context of the report to ask site owners to review permissions. Site owners will receive an email with actions to take, along with a redirect to the site that clearly shows sharing and permissions. This feature will be released in August.

Turn instant inspiration into action with Copilot Lab.

Pilot’s Lab Empowering users to confidently embark on their AI journey and maximize the potential of Copilot in their daily work with curated prompts. Soon, with a simple click, users will be able to pull up all the prompts from the Copilot Lab website and run the prompts in Copilot in Graph-grounding chat, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel by selecting the “Try in” button on each prompt card. This feature will be released in August.

Users can visit Pilot’s Lab Explore our latest collection of prompts today or check out Copilot Labs in your favorite Microsoft 365 apps or on mobile to get inspired right in your workflow.

Copilot Lab prompt cards in a web environment with the ability to run prompts by selecting a “Try It” button in a given app.

Improve your understanding of your data with Copilot in Excel

Copilot in Excel helps users explore and understand their data. Now users can understand their data more easily with new features that enable previews of requested changes and support for complex conditional formatting.

Now, when a user requests Copilot to change table data, Copilot provides a description of the planned change and a button to apply the change, giving the user additional information to decide whether to proceed with the update. The user can refine the change and apply it when ready. This feature Released in July.

In an Excel worksheet with sales data, where a user asked Copilot to “highlight rows where Q1 and Q2 are greater than Q3 and Q4,” Copilot suggested a formula with an “Apply” button that the user could click.

Conditional formatting can be especially useful to users when shaping worksheets. Now, when users set conditional formatting rules, Copilot can include a preview of the conditional formatting style that will be applied, and a formula description if available. This feature will be released in July.

We’ve also added support for complex conditional formatting, so you can ask Copilot to highlight rows or columns based on a combination of inputs. For example, a user could ask Copilot, “Highlight rows where ‘Priority’ is ‘Important’ and ‘Status’ is not ‘Completed’.” This feature is available Released in July.

Here is an Excel worksheet where a user asked Copilot to “highlight rows that have sales leads but no territories listed” and Copilot reviewed and suggested conditional formatting rules to apply.

Soon, users will be able to add a single formula to Copilot to request that column data be summarized into a single cell. Currently, full column calculations produce unique results for each row, but this new feature gives users the option to calculate all the data in a column together, returning a single result. This feature Released in July.

An Excel worksheet containing sales data where a user asks Copilot to “Calculate total product sales for 2021” and Copilot reviews and suggests formulas to apply.

Write and organize emails faster with Copilot

Drafts in Copilot is a feature that improves and streamlines the email drafting process. Users can now request Copilot to draft an email using the right-hand chat by selecting the Copilot icon in the top right of the app. Since Copilot knows which emails a user is reading, you can ask Copilot to draft a response by asking something like “Reply to this email to confirm…” and Copilot will continue developing the draft in the compose window. Using the same chat experience, users can also ask Copilot to organize their emails using prompts like “Move all emails from…” sales@contoso.com “Put it in my sales folder.” Both features will be released in July.

The image shows the process when asking Copilot to draft an email using the right pane chat within Outlook.

Improve document summarization in Copilot for Word

Now with Copilot in Word, users can summarize documents containing up to 80,000 words (depending on language)—about four times more words than Copilot could previously summarize.For more information, please visit hereThis feature will be released in July. Web, Desktop, and Mac.

A 66-page Word document is opened. When the user clicks the Copilot icon, a Copilot chat window appears and the user asks Copilot to “summarize this document.” The summary appears in the Copilot chat window.

Create a quiz in Forms using Copilot

Copilot in Forms helps users create forms and surveys quickly and easily. Now Copilot lets users Create quizzes with correct answers based on intent and input.Perfect for teachers, trainers or anyone looking to assess knowledge in an engaging and interactive way. This feature Released in July.

A computer screen showing a prompt window for drafting a quiz to be created with Copilot.

Improve centralized communication using Copilot in Viva Amplify Editor

We’re revolutionizing the way users create and improve their content by bringing the power of Copilot directly into the Viva Amplify editing environment, providing writing assistance for all communications. Users simply click the Copilot icon to get help with content, style, rewriting, and tone. Copilot on Viva Amplify is Available in preview August.

A computer screenshot showing the Microsoft Viva page with a draft email to be sent to all administrators.

Improvements based on your feedback

We continue to gather feedback from IT professionals and end users of Copilot for Microsoft 365. Thanks to your feedback, we have developed and released many new features and functionality over the past few months.

You asked for better script management, and we delivered. Improved viewing, downloading, and deleting experience for Teams meeting recording files, Consent for explicit transcription in Teams meetings, where applicable by policy, Tenant-wide policy for allowing meeting minutes downloads and user-level control over who can download meeting minutes.

You also asked for a better summary, and we released one based on multiple emails, presentations, and Teams chats, referencing multiple files. Draft based on text, list or table selection, Support for complex formula columns across multiple tables in Copilot for ExcelAnd there’s a feature in Word that lets you summarize content in less than 200 words.

Additionally, other features we have developed to address your feedback include: Limited SharePoint search lets you disable organization-wide search and select the current search set.and Immersive Reader support for Word.

Did you know? that much Microsoft 365 Roadmap Your place to get the latest updates on productivity apps and intelligent cloud services. The dates mentioned in this article are tentative dates and are subject to change. Check back regularly to see what’s currently in development or coming soon.