How to Use Copilot in Microsoft Word for Executives

Open a new document in Word, click the Copilot icon, and choose 'Draft with Copilot.' Provide a description of what you want the document to be: its purpose, its audience, its key points, and its structure.

Example: 'Draft a board paper recommending the approval of [project]. The audience is our board of directors. The paper should cover: executive summary, strategic rationale, financial implications (investment required: £X, expected return: Y), key risks and mitigations, and next steps if approved. Tone: formal, concise, data-driven. Length: three pages maximum.'

Copilot generates a structured draft from this description. The draft will need editing, particularly for organisation-specific content and strategic framing, but the structure and the scaffolding of the argument are there in seconds rather than hours.

For best results, be specific about structure, length, tone, and the key points that must be covered. Vague instructions produce generic drafts; specific instructions produce drafts that are closer to final.

Select any text in a Word document and use the Copilot 'Rewrite' or 'Transform' options to improve it.

Useful transformations: 'Make this more concise, keeping only the essential information' -- for dense paragraphs that need to be shorter. 'Rewrite this for a non-technical audience' -- for sections that use specialist language with a general audience. 'Make this more formal' or 'Make this more direct' -- for tone adjustments. 'Convert this prose to a bulleted list highlighting the key points' -- for improving scannability.

Copilot can also work at the document level: 'Review this document and suggest how it could be improved for clarity and persuasiveness for a board audience.'

For editing work done by your team: paste a section and ask 'What is unclear or unconvincing in this passage? How would you improve it?' This gives you specific, actionable feedback to give the author rather than just a general 'this needs work.'

For long documents you are reviewing (reports, proposals, submissions), use Copilot's summarisation feature: open the document and click 'Summarise this document' in the Copilot pane.

For targeted extraction: 'What are the three most important recommendations in this document?' or 'What financial commitments is this document asking us to make?' or 'What risks does this document identify and how seriously does it treat them?'

For comparing documents: open two similar documents (two proposals, two versions of the same document) and ask 'What are the key differences between this document and [reference document]?' This is particularly useful for reviewing revised versions of contracts or proposals where understanding what has changed matters more than reading every word.

For documents that need to be evidence-based (strategy documents, regulatory submissions, business cases), Copilot can help identify where claims need supporting evidence.

'Review this document and identify any statements that are assertions without supporting evidence. For each, suggest the type of evidence that would strengthen the claim.'

For documents drawing on multiple source files, use the '@' mention to reference other documents in your Microsoft 365 environment: 'Draft a section summarising our position on [topic] drawing on @[Document 1] and @[Document 2].' Copilot synthesises across the referenced documents to produce an integrated draft.

For regulatory submissions or compliance documents, ask Copilot to check consistency: 'Does this document contain any commitments or statements that appear inconsistent with each other? Are there any areas where we make a claim in section 2 that appears to be contradicted by information in section 5?'