Copilot for Your Staff · Lesson 7 of 7

Capstone: five tasks, one list, two weeks

20 minutes today, then five minutes a day for two weeks. Do real work with Copilot, write down what it can't see, and find out if it's saving time.

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You've sorted out which Copilot you have, checked your sharing, learned the four parts of a prompt, and tried Copilot in Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Now you do it for real, in your own files, and you keep score.

The capstone has three parts:

• Five everyday tasks, done today in your own files.
• The "can't see" list, written down so your team stops guessing.
• A two-week habit, with a log that answers one question: is this worth it?

Open the Two-Week Copilot Log template. Do these five tasks with your own work, not practice files. For each, write the time it took and a quick guess at how long it would have taken without Copilot.

Task 1: Catch up on a thread (Outlook). Pick the longest unread or half-read conversation in your inbox. Use Summary by Copilot. Click one citation to check it.

Task 2: Reply to a real email (Outlook). Use Help me reply or Draft with Copilot with a four-part prompt. Check facts, promises and the question asked. Send it yourself.

Task 3: Turn a meeting into action items (Teams). Use the Recap tab if you have the paid license, or paste part of a transcript into Copilot Chat if you don't. Check every owner and due date. Post it yourself.

Task 4: Draft from your own file (Word). Use / to point Copilot at a document you trust. Check every fact and remove every [CHECK].

Task 5: Ask your numbers a question (Excel). In a spreadsheet saved to OneDrive or SharePoint, ask one question in the chat-only way. Check the answer by hand.

At Comfort Zone Heating & Cooling (our fictional company), Marcus logged his five. Thread summary: 1 minute, would have been 8. Reply: 3 minutes, would have been 6. Meeting notes: 5 minutes, would have been 15. Word letter: 12 minutes, would have been 30. Excel: 4 minutes, and he found a duplicate invoice he'd missed for a month. These are illustrations. Your numbers are the ones that count.

Half the frustration with Copilot is asking it for something it can't reach. Write your team's list on the template so nobody wastes time. Start with these, each from Microsoft's own pages, and cross out any that don't apply:

Without the paid license (Copilot Chat):

• Your company's files, chats and email across Microsoft 365, outside of Outlook. Copilot Chat is grounded in the web plus what you give it.
• Anything inside a Teams meeting. The Copilot Chat app in Teams uses public web data only.

For everyone, paid license or not:

• Anything you don't have permission to open. Copilot shows only what you can already see.
• Shared, group, delegate and archive mailboxes. Copilot in Outlook works on your own mailbox only. If customer email lands in a shared service@ inbox, Copilot can't help there.
• Mailboxes not hosted in Exchange Online.
• Meetings hosted by another company, and end-to-end encrypted meetings.
• A meeting after it ends, if nobody transcribed it and Copilot ran "only during the meeting."
• Files locked with certain sensitivity labels or encryption, unless your permissions allow Copilot to work with them.
• Files that live only on your computer. Copilot's work reach is Microsoft 365 content. Upload the file, or save it to OneDrive or SharePoint.
• Your other business systems (your scheduling software, accounting system or CRM) unless your IT partner connects them.

Add your own as you find them. Every "can't see" you write down saves someone a confused afternoon.

New tools fade when they're optional and nobody keeps score. So for ten working days, each person on your Copilot pilot does this:

Every morning (2 minutes): Summarize your two longest new threads in Outlook before reading them in full.

Every day (once): Use Copilot for one real draft: an email reply, a letter, a set of meeting notes or a spreadsheet question. A person checks it and sends it.

Every day (1 minute): Write one line in the log: the task, minutes spent, your guess without Copilot, and one of three marks: used as is, small fix, or big fix or wrong.

Every Friday (5 minutes): Each person shares one prompt that worked. The best ones go on the Copilot Prompt Card.

Add up the log. Write three short answers at the bottom of the template:

• Minutes saved per person per week. Your guesses minus your actual times. Rough is fine.
• How often was the draft wrong? Count the "big fix or wrong" marks. If it's more than one in four, look at your prompts (Lesson 3) and your source files (Lesson 6) before you blame Copilot.
• What's worth paying for? If someone on Copilot Chat kept wishing it could see their Teams meetings or files, that's the case for the paid license, for that person. If someone with the paid license barely used it, that seat may be better spent elsewhere.

Be honest if the number is small. Two hours a week per person is real money. Ten minutes a week may not be, and that's a fine answer too.

Use your three templates and tick every box:

• [ ] Every person knows whether they have Copilot Chat or the paid license (Lesson 1).
• [ ] The Oversharing Check is done, and your IT partner has the three questions (Lesson 2).
• [ ] The Copilot Prompt Card has your team's own prompts for Outlook, Teams, Word and Excel.
• [ ] Five real tasks are logged, each checked and sent by a person.
• [ ] The "can't see" list is written and shared with the team.
• [ ] Ten days of log entries, three answers at the bottom, and a decision about licenses.

You started with a Copilot button nobody trusted. Now your team knows which Copilot they have, what it can and can't see, how to ask for what they want, and how to check what comes back. Your files are shared with the right people. And you have two weeks of real numbers instead of a hunch.

Next steps, when you're ready:

• Copilot Foundry (/courses/copilot-foundry) to build your own agents in Copilot Studio.
• Write Your Team's AI Rules in an Afternoon to turn "a person sends" and your "transcript off" list into a policy everyone signs.
• Lock the Doors: AI Security Basics for a Small Office for the accounts and settings behind it all.

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