5 Major Microsoft Copilot Changes You Need to Know (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: One thing I always say when I teach Microsoft Copilot is that things change constantly. And right now, this has never been more true. There were some big changes at the end of last year that will directly affect how a lot of us use Copilot. I'm Nick, and here are five big changes in Copilot. The first big thing you need to be aware of is that the paid Copilot subscriptions have all been changed. Now we're not talking about the free version of Copilot, that's still free. But if you upgraded to Copilot Pro in the past to get more features, well, that's now gone. Now, all upgraded Copilot features are included in a Microsoft 365 subscription. So if you buy your own subscription as an individual, you can get Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, or Premium. Business and enterprise users will have a baseline of Copilot features included with their account and the option for the upgraded Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription. But of course, your company or organization would have to buy that upgrade. So whether you like the change or not, it's a little less confusing because all Copilot upgrades are now included in a Microsoft 365 subscription. Okay, number two is the new option for a temporary chat. This is only for people with a business or enterprise account. If you buy your own subscription as an individual, sorry, this one isn't for you. Normally, when you ask a question or make a request with Copilot, it saves that chat. You can find your saved chats in the panel on the left and you can continue a chat later with all of the established context. But if you don't want a Copilot request to be saved in your history, you can choose the temporary chat. But be careful with this. This is not a privacy feature. In a business or enterprise account, your Microsoft administrator may still be able to retain information about your Copilot requests even with the temporary mode enabled. The reason I love the temporary mode is because I like to keep my chat history clean. I don't need Copilot to save all of my requests. So now I use a temporary chat for anything I don't want to save. Now onto the third big change. You may know that you can use the Copilot panel inside of productivity applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. For individual users who buy their own subscription, these additional features are actually included. No need for anything more than your normal Microsoft 365 account. But in the past, for business and enterprise users, the Copilot panel in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint was only available at the highest subscription tier. Now, business and enterprise users do get that Copilot panel in those apps even with the baseline Microsoft 365 account. However, there are some features in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that happen outside of the Copilot panel. In a business or enterprise account, those features are still reserved for the highest subscription. So for example, anybody with a Microsoft 365 account can access the Copilot panel in Microsoft Word. But the Copilot tool to rewrite text within the document editing window, that's outside of the Copilot panel. So business users need the upgraded subscription. In PowerPoint, you can generate new presentations, make individual slides, or ask Copilot to translate a presentation. Again, outside of the Copilot panel, so business users will need the upgraded subscription for that too. And there are some features in Excel, but those are so big that those count as separate points. Which brings us to number four, Copilot app skills in Excel. In Excel, there is the Copilot button to open the Copilot panel. This is great at answering questions or helping you learn how to do something in Excel. But if you want Copilot to make changes directly to your spreadsheet, then you need the new tool called Copilot app skills. This is available for all individual users and business or enterprise users will need the full Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription. If you have one of those subscriptions, you can open a menu under the Copilot button in the ribbon and choose Copilot app skills. With that enabled, you can ask Copilot to modify your spreadsheet. You can ask it to do something like highlight cells with a certain value. It will suggest a change to conditional formatting and it will ask your permission before making the change. If you click apply, it can make that change to your spreadsheet. I can tell Copilot to make a pivot table. It needs me to approve the change first, but then it adds that pivot table to a separate sheet in my workbook. So if you want Copilot to actively make changes to your spreadsheets, you need Copilot app skills. And we're going to stay with Excel for number five. This is one of the most powerful Copilot features I've seen. It's called the agent mode in Excel. You may have heard of this because Kevin did a video on this a few months ago on this channel. At that time, it was in preview form and took some extra work to enable. Now it's no longer in preview. And even though it's one of the most powerful features, it is available in all Microsoft 365 subscriptions. To use this, you cannot work with an Excel file that's stored locally on your computer. Even if you're starting with a blank sheet, that file has to be stored on OneDrive or another Microsoft cloud storage tool. Then make sure that autosave is turned on. Open the Copilot panel. In the chat field, click the tools button and choose the agent mode. The agent mode can do research. It can find data on the internet. It can make independent decisions and create spreadsheets and create other material based on your requests. So I could tell the agent to make a new spreadsheet for me based on mortgage rates over the past five years. The agent mode does take significantly more time than other Copilot requests, but it can create new workbooks, including spreadsheets and other material like charts and graphs based on research data. Now, there is one thing I will recommend with the agent mode. You should read the Copilot responses very carefully. If the agent mode doesn't find the data it needs, it may create projections or placeholders based on limited information. So keep an eye on that. Or here's another thing we could do. I could open an existing spreadsheet and I can ask the agent mode to analyze my data to help me achieve certain goals. With a well-written prompt, the agent mode can find insights and create dashboards for me. The agent mode can expand your existing data or create charts and tables that can be manipulated to show important insights about the data. The agent mode in Excel is the most powerful, all safeties off tool for analyzing data or creating new content in Excel. Of course, Copilot has not finished changing. One thing I can guarantee is that more things will shift over time. We've got some exciting changes to be aware of and some very powerful tools we can use today. And I'll be keeping an eye out to see what comes next. For more videos like this and to learn more, make sure to subscribe to this channel.