Your first day with Copilot, without the confusion.
Microsoft put Copilot everywhere — which is exactly why day one is confusing. Free or paid? App or sidebar? Work data or web data? This lesson untangles it and gets you to five real wins before lunch.
01 Which Copilot do you actually have?
There are really two Copilots, and knowing which one you're in explains almost everything:
| Version | Where | What it knows |
|---|---|---|
| Copilot (free / consumer) | copilot.microsoft.com, Windows, Edge, the mobile app | The web + what you type. Great general assistant; knows nothing about your files or email. |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot (paid, work) | Inside Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, PowerPoint + the M365 Copilot app | All of the above plus your work — your emails, files, meetings, and chats, permission-aware. |
The quickest tell: open Copilot and ask "summarize my unread email." If it can, you have the work version. If it politely can't, you're on consumer Copilot — still very useful, different job. (Licensing and prices: our what Copilot costs lesson.)
02 Three settings before anything else
03 Five first wins (work version)
- "Summarize my unread email and flag anything that needs a reply today."
- "What did I commit to in meetings this week?"
- In Word: "Draft a one-page summary of [attached/linked document] for a customer."
- In Excel, on a real sheet: "What are the three biggest changes vs last month?"
- In Teams, after any meeting you missed: "What happened, what was decided, what's mine?"
On the free version, swap in: rewrite an email, summarize a long article in Edge's sidebar, draft a quote from bullet points, photograph a document with the app and ask questions about it.
Copilot's superpower isn't intelligence — it's proximity. It's already inside the apps where your work lives. The winning habit is asking in place: in Outlook about email, in Excel about the sheet — not copy-pasting your work life into a separate chat window.
Run the tell ("summarize my unread email"), then do whichever five-wins list matches your version. Before lunch.
Open Copilot →This week's challenge
Each workday this week, ask Copilot one question inside a different app — Outlook Monday, Teams Tuesday, Word Wednesday, Excel Thursday, and Friday ask the M365 app to recap your week. Five days, five surfaces: after that you'll know exactly where Copilot earns its seat for you.