Microsoft adds faster Copilot to Excel and Word

Microsoft is upgrading Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with a faster version of its AI-powered digital assistant, Copilot.

The next stage of Microsoft 365 Copilot is here, as announced by Microsoft on Monday (Sep. 16), with the integration of the AI assistant into the Microsoft 365 apps. This comes alongside a new product, Copilot Pages, geared towards multi-user AI collaboration.  Microsoft has implemented over 700 product updates this year, resulting in an AI model with responses that are more than two times faster on average.

Copilot has already been active in Microsoft Teams, assisting users with meeting transcripts, notes, and listing potential action items. Moving the tool into other apps will assist users with tasks like advanced data analysis in Excel, managing your inbox in Outlook, and more.

AI-powered agents are also rolling out, ranging from simple, prompt-and-response bots to more advanced, fully autonomous agents. While you can tweak Copilot agents to suit your needs if you choose, Microsoft also has pre-built agents like the new Visual creator agent, which helps to create AI-generated images and designs, with plans to incorporate videos down the line as well.

Today, we launched the next wave of Microsoft 365 Copilot innovation, bringing together web + work + Pages as a new design system for work: https://t.co/GFA32PxxP8 pic.twitter.com/g9m1wXqpdI

— Microsoft (@Microsoft) September 16, 2024

The Copilot features vary between the different Microsoft apps. In Excel, for example, the AI aims to assist users with advanced analysis tasks, such as forecasting, risk analysis, machine learning, and visualizing complex data. It’s paired with Python but requires no coding knowledge to use.

For Word, the focus is on automating the referencing process when creating lists of references, for example, as well as offering suggested prompts to jumpstart the creative process. Copilot can also make inline suggestions while you work on specific sections of your document.

Moving over to PowerPoint, Microsoft is leaning into branded decks and narrative storytelling, with a suite of features that will likely prove useful for agencies and businesses creating pitch decks or similar presentations. One prompt can build an outline for a presentation populated with topics that can be edited and refined to create a first draft.

Outlook has the option to organize your inbox using AI, analyzing your inbox based on both the content of your email and the context of your role. It tracks user behavior, such as who they report to and the email threads where they’ve been most responsive, to suggest responses.

The rollout of these new features and Copilot Pages began on September 16.

Featured image: Microsoft

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