COPILOT WEEKLY
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5-minute read
3 QUICK WINS · 2 WORKFLOWS · 1 POWER PLAY
Same weekly, new look. This is the Copilot Weekly you signed up for from Copilot Samaritan, now sent under that name. Same 3-2-1, exact clicks included.
👋 Hello, Hello. Your company already pays for Copilot, and most people use it to make emails about 10% politer. This week: three things it does that nobody showed you, two workflows built from questions you sent in, and one move for the people who read to the end. Exact clicks included.
IN 5 MINUTES, BE THE ONE IN THE OFFICE WHO KNOWS COPILOT:
Ask Excel the question instead of writing the formula.
Talk to Copilot. It writes better when you ramble.
Find the thread and draft the reply in one chat.
Hand Cowork your weekly brief, and your unanswered emails.
Make ChatGPT and Claude argue inside Copilot.
3 Quick wins, for anyone just starting
1. 📊 Ask your spreadsheet, skip the formula
Copilot in Excel answers questions about the sheet in plain English, so the pivot table, the VLOOKUP research and the squinting at column F can all go. Ask "Which sales rep had the highest revenue this month?" and it finds them. "Show me a chart of monthly growth" gives you the chart. "Highlight any sales below target" does it. "Create a summary of Q3 performance by region" comes back as the analysis, not a formula you still have to check.
The path: open Excel → Copilot button on the ribbon (top right) → ask in the chat pane. Start with the messiest sheet you own and one question you'd normally build a pivot for.
VLOOKUP can stay in 2019.
2. 🎙 Ramble at it
Typing prompts is the new bottleneck. You talk faster than you type, and a rambling spoken explanation almost always gives Copilot more to work with than a clipped one-liner. Hit the microphone in the prompt box and talk through the task the way you'd explain it to a coworker who just sat down: what it's for, who reads it, what good looks like. More detail in, better output out.
The mic lives in the prompt box.
Do this: On your next prompt, press the mic and talk for thirty seconds instead of typing eight words. Compare the two answers.
If your prompts have felt thin lately, this is usually why. Ours too.
3. 🔍 Find the thread, draft the reply, one chat
Copilot Chat in Outlook hunts through your inbox, finds the conversation you half-remember, and drafts the reply with the whole thread already in its head. You never re-read the chain.
Search first, then draft with the context already loaded.
Open Copilot Chat in Outlook, or on the web.
Ask: "Find the email thread where we discussed the Q4 budget timeline."
Copilot returns the thread.
Ask: "Draft a response confirming we're ready to move forward and asking about next steps on the approval process."
Read it, change one line, send.
Why it works: you find the needle and write a better reply, because Copilot already knows what was said three emails ago.
The needle and the reply, in one chat.
Where does Copilot earn its keep for you?
2 Workflows, built from your questions
1. 🤝 Hand Cowork the weekly brief
Cowork is Copilot's operating mode: not a chat, a hand-off. Give it multi-step work such as the weekly report, the data cleanup, customer follow-ups or the content calendar, and it runs the steps across Excel, Word, Teams, Slack, Gmail, Google Drive and Notion while you watch. It keeps context between steps, can pull your work context through WorkIQ, and nothing ships until you approve it.
Cowork: the mode where Copilot does the steps, not just the sentence.
Use this prompt: "Check latest communication via email, threads and messages with my team, check documents, and help me create an Executive Brief / Business Pulse (what each team member should be doing next week so everything runs smoothly)."
The brief, being built.
Monday's status meeting just became a document you approve on Sunday night.
2. 📬 Stop cc'ing yourself
A reader wrote in with a habit half of us share: cc yourself on every email you send to another team so it sits in your inbox until they reply, then file it once the task is done. That's a follow-up system made of guilt. Cowork can be the follow-up system instead. Run this once a week:
Use this prompt: "Review emails I sent during the last 14 days. Identify emails where: I requested an action, decision, approval, update, or information; no response has been received; the email is not an FYI, newsletter, or informational message. Create a report that includes: recipient, subject, date sent, days awaiting response. Group results by recipient. For emails older than 5 business days without a response, draft a polite follow-up for my approval. Save the report to my Copilot output folder and notify me when complete."
If you coordinate across teams, this is the whole follow-up job: open requests surfaced, nudges drafted, you approve. The cc field goes back to being for other people.
Shoutout to Turning Naturals for writing in with this one!
1 Power play
⚖ Make ChatGPT and Claude argue inside Copilot
If you've ever wanted to see how ChatGPT and Claude answer the same question side by side, Copilot now does it for you. Switch to Researcher, then change the model picker from Auto to Model Council. Copilot runs your prompt through both models separately and hands back three things: each model's own report, and a synthesis of where they agreed and where they split.
Researcher → Auto → Model Council.
Do this: Put your next real decision memo through Council and read the "where they diverged" section first. That's where the risk lives.
Any single model can miss something or sound confident about it. Two independent takes, and exactly where they disagree, is a sanity check you don't get from one report. Two models, one referee, and the referee is you.
🎤 Ask us anything. Show us what you built.
A Copilot question you can't crack, a prompt that won't land, a feature you keep seeing but don't quite get: reply to this email. The best ones get answered in a future issue, and your questions, your use cases and new feature drops decide what we cover next.
Built something with Copilot? A workflow, a prompt stack, a weird little system that saves you an hour a week? Reply and tell us. The whole point of this list is people sharing what they're shipping so everyone learns together. Thanks again to Turning Naturals for this week's question.
Don't forget to rate today's post
That's your Copilot 3-2-1 for the week.
Kushank and team
Copilot Samaritan · Copilot Weekly is a PracticalyAI newsletter · practicaly.ai/copilot
