4 Ways Microsoft Copilot Drives Coworker Productivity at CDW

Our teams use Microsoft Copilot to automate a range of daily tasks. Here’s a few ways our project management, operations and marketing teams save time with Copilot.

Searching for the right formula or method in Microsoft Excel can often be time consuming. However, you can type a Copilot prompt next time instead of manually executing functions.

Copilot understands natural language prompts within Excel and uses them to build formulas, remove duplicates or visualize data.

This can save you time and help you get to the desired outcome, without scrambling for the right formulas. Copilot is context-aware of the spreadsheet you’re working on, so it also understands data labels.

You can ask, “What are the top 5 products by sales?” or “Calculate the monthly average.” You can also use column headers in your prompts such as “Sort the table in ascending order by ‘Date.’”

This is typically useful for teams that don’t routinely use Excel for data analysis. Even non-experts can access a plethora of functions in Excel with minimal training.

Do more with Copilot in Excel

• Complete columns based on patterns: Fill in missing data based on a pattern with prompts like “Complete the month names based on the date pattern in Column A.”
• Optimize formulas: Refine formula inconsistencies by asking Copilot to explain or improve the formula to avoid errors.
• Plan scenarios: Simulate scenarios such as sales forecasts by prompting Copilot to build scenarios based on current data.

It could be overwhelming for workers who communicate with several teams regularly to keep track of each conversation all the time. Luckily, Copilot can help catch up quickly with email and chat updates.

Microsoft 365 Copilot can access updates throughout the Office 365 suite whether they be files, emails or Microsoft Teams messages.

Instead of going through all the chats and emails, you can summarize updates by mentioning team member names or get summaries of the key projects you’re working on.

Simply mention the team member in a prompt such as “Summarize unread messages from Jon” and Copilot will list the most important updates you need to know.

This could be quite useful for roles like project management, marketing management or operations coordination, which receive a lot of messages.

Additionally, Copilot can write eloquent email replies and help you construct contextual responses, using an email thread or a chat history for context so you can catch up with collaborators in a few minutes instead of hours.

If you miss an hour-long meeting due to a calendar conflict, or even enter 15 minutes late, it can take some time to fully grasp what was discussed.

With Copilot, you can summarize the discussion in a bullet list of key items and avoid going through the recording or asking a coworker to bring you up to speed.

From within Microsoft Teams, bring up Copilot and ask it to summarize the meeting into bullet points. You can further ask “What was the key agenda?” or “What tasks were assigned to me?”

This feature is helpful for longer meetings with multiple overarching agendas. Copilot understands who is speaking, annotates the discussion and churns out a well-constructed summary.

It also allows you to be flexible with your schedule and focus on priorities in a much more balanced way. For workers with heavily booked calendars, this can help prevent burnout.

Once you have the summary, you can also use it to draft emails, build Microsoft Word documents or schedule events within Copilot.

Building a quick presentation is easy but making it professional and on-brand can take a lot of effort and time. Too often, hours can go by working on a presentation that would be seen for less than five minutes.

Fortunately, Copilot in Microsoft PowerPoint can free up a lot of time spent with several key aspects of drafting a presentation. You can even convert a Microsoft Word document into a ready-made PowerPoint presentation.

To do this, head to PowerPoint and ask Copilot to create a presentation based on a file stored in OneDrive. Use the ‘/’ symbol to bring up file options and let it build a quick boilerplate for you.

After that, you can review each slide and tweak it by entering prompts such as “Make this slide less wordy” or “Add a slide that contains an executive summary of the file.”

You can also add more images, text or animation to your newly created presentation with Copilot prompts. It can directly apply several changes to the entire presentation at once to save time with major edits.

Do more with Copilot in PowerPoint

• Generate additional content: Supplement your draft with additional content, images or slides by prompting Copilot to come up with ideas based on your current presentation.
• Improve slide design: Get suggestions for layouts that align with your presentation’s theme. Try prompts like “Suggest a layout for a financial overview slide” or “Arrange these bullet points for better readability.”
• Add speaker notes: Create speaker notes based on the slide content. Try prompting “Generate speaker notes for this slide” to get helpful talking points.

We are only getting started on how Microsoft Copilot can boost productivity for teams across departments and verticals. From empowering professionals at a personal level to ramping up team collaboration, it can add value to the entire organization.

CDW Canada partners with Microsoft to help you deploy Copilot and maximize the benefits for your organization. Our digital transformation experts can guide you on the licences, user training and roll-out planning so you can hit the ground running, without hurdles.

For existing Microsoft customers, we can bring the capabilities of Copilot to your organization while adhering to your security, compliance and safety policies. Get in touch with your account representative to kickstart the Copilot adoption process.