COPILOT WEEKLY
Wed, October 14, 2026
6-minute read
3 QUICK WINS · 2 THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW · 1 GUIDE
👋 Hello, Hello.
This week: a newsletter idea we borrowed from one of you, Copilot inside Power BI, and a plain-English look at WorkIQ. Then two tips, and a free guide on what Copilot can cost your company.
IN 5 MINUTES, BE THE ONE IN THE OFFICE WHO KNOWS COPILOT:
Turn your weekly tracker into a team newsletter that lands in an email, not another meeting.
Ask a Power BI report a question in plain English.
Know what WorkIQ is, and what it isn't.
Build a deck by talking to PowerPoint.
Get Teams channel messages summarized in your Outlook inbox.
Know what Copilot is costing your company, and where to check.
3 Quick wins, for anyone just starting
1. 📬 Skip the status meeting: send a weekly team newsletter
This one came from a Facebook comment on our weekly tracker short, which turns a tracker into a presentation and checks it against your Teams messages, emails and meetings. His team does something similar with a Word doc: a weekly newsletter across 10 business lines, with top risks, impact, wins and overall health. We like it because a newsletter reaches your team in an email, instead of another meeting.
Here's one way to build the same kind of newsletter with Copilot:
Save your tracker in OneDrive or SharePoint.
Open Copilot → Cowork.
Paste the prompt below.
Fill in the two [brackets]: your tracker's file name, and who should get the email.
Press Enter. Cowork shows you the draft email first, so read it and ask for changes.
Approve it, and Cowork sends it to your team. No meeting needed.
The prompt: "Using my tracker [tracker file name], write a one-page weekly team newsletter. Start with a 2-line summary. Then, for each team or business line, give: top risks, impact, wins this week, and overall health (Green, Amber or Red, with one line on why). End with the decisions we need this week. Keep it short and easy to scan. Use only what's in the tracker. If something is missing, write 'Not provided' instead of guessing. Then draft an email to [names or group] with the newsletter in the body, and show it to me first. Don't send anything until I approve."
We did something similar with Cowork sending a weekly team newsletter.
The catch: The Green, Amber or Red is Copilot's guess from your notes. If your team has its own rules for what counts as Red, add them to the prompt.
Same headings every week, and your team reads it instead of sitting through another meeting.
2. 📊 Ask your Power BI report a question
You don't have to click through every chart to understand a report. Copilot in Power BI lets you ask about it in plain English. We tried it on a live report, and it answered about the page we were on.
Open a report in the Power BI service (app.powerbi.com).
Click Copilot in the top ribbon.
Start with a suggested prompt like "What is this report page about?" or type "Summarize this page."
Then ask your own question, like "Which region grew the most?" Ask one question at a time.
Requires: Copilot in Power BI needs a paid capacity (Fabric or Power BI Premium) and an admin to turn it on. Power BI Pro on its own is not enough. Not sure? Ask your Power BI admin: "Is Copilot enabled for our workspace?"
The catch: Check any number it gives you against the chart before it goes in a slide. Power BI warns that AI-generated content may be incorrect.
Ask the report, instead of hunting through it.
3. 🧠 What is WorkIQ?
You've probably heard of WorkIQ. It's the layer behind Microsoft 365 Copilot that knows your work: your emails, meetings, files and chats, plus what Copilot has learned about how you work. It's the reason Copilot can answer "what did we decide in last week's meeting?" instead of giving a generic answer.
So when you click it, you can only turn it on/off, but you feel it every time Copilot answers from your own work.
We have been using it a lot, it has been very useful:
→ Part 51: Tracker into slides that update from your week
→ Part 48: Tasks tracker that updates itself
→ Part 41: Teams messages go into Outlook
→ Part 35: Annual progress, weekly summary
→ Part 32: Scan email and create reminders on your calendar
Reply to this email with questions about it, a use case you've tried, or tell us the use case you'd like to see. We'll cover the best ones in a future issue.
2 Things you didn't know you could do
You've got a meeting in 20 minutes, you know exactly what you'll say, but you have no slides. Let Copilot build them from what you say out loud.
Open PowerPoint and start a blank deck.
Click Copilot, then the mic button.
Talk through what the meeting is about, the main points, and what you want from the room.
Copilot builds a deck from it, with an intro, breakdowns and talking points.
Talk for two minutes, edit for five.
Important Teams messages don't always reach the people who live in Outlook. Have Copilot Cowork watch the channel for you.
Open Copilot → Cowork.
Paste the prompt below, with your own channel.
Approve the automation when Cowork asks.
The prompt: "Whenever a new message is posted in the General channel of my Teams team, summarize it in 2-3 bullet points and send me an email notification in Outlook with the summary and a link to the message. Set this up as an automation and ask me for approval before sending anything."
The channel stays busy, and your inbox gets the short version.
1 Guide
Copilot used to feel like one monthly fee. Now part of it is billed by use.
Chat, the Word, Excel and PowerPoint buttons still come with your license, but Cowork's agent-style work is billed in credits. Someone in our Instagram community pointed us to a free guide that explains how it works: The Tokenomics Playbook for Microsoft AI, from SoftwareOne. It's a vendor guide and it ends with a pitch for their advisory services, but the explanation is worth your time.
What's in it, in plain words:
Work done by Copilot agents like Cowork is measured in credits, and Microsoft prices each credit at about a penny on pay-as-you-go. Credits are Microsoft's simple version of tokens, the small chunks of text the AI reads and writes.
A short prompt can hide a big job. The guide's example is "Please summarize this PDF and the attached emails." It sounds small, but if the PDF is 40 pages and the emails are long threads, Cowork has to read all of it first, and that reading is what you pay for.
The guide's own example: a 150-person company whose first invoice showed 142,000 credits used by Cowork, about $1,420. That's the guide's hypothetical, so check your own rate with IT, since prepaid plans can change it.
What to check, 5 to 10 minutes a month:
Type /cost in your biggest Cowork tasks to see what each one used. We covered it in last week's newsletter.
Ask your IT admin who can see the Cost Management page in the Microsoft 365 admin center, and whether a monthly limit or alert is set.
Keep the tasks worth their credits. Shrink or stop the ones that aren't.
You don't need to be the budget owner. Knowing where the number lives puts you ahead of most of the office.
🎤 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.
Built something with Copilot? A workflow, a prompt stack, a skill file 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.
Don't forget to rate today's post
That's your Copilot 3-2-1 for the week. Reply with a WorkIQ question, or the Power BI report you'd try this on first.
Kushank and team
Copilot Samaritan · Copilot Weekly is a PracticalyAI newsletter · practicaly.ai/copilot
