🧠 Welcome to your new Copilot habit

If you regularly use Copilot for work, repeating the same background information gets old quickly. Your role, the kind of reports you create, how you like information presented… Copilot can now remember useful details like these between conversations.

It’s called Copilot Memory.

In Copilot Chat, you can explicitly tell it something you’d like it to remember. For instance: “Remember that I manage a sales team and prefer weekly updates as short bullet points with action items at the end.”

Copilot uses that information in future conversations, so its responses become better suited to your work.

Here’s how to set this up:

Open Copilot Chat and go to Settings and more → Chat settings → Personalization → Saved memories → Manage saved memories (You can review or delete memories here, or turn Memory off altogether)

If emails from your manager are sitting between an industry newsletter, three automated notifications and a “RE: RE: RE:” chain, Outlook rules can help.

A rule tells Outlook what to automatically do when a certain type of email arrives in your inbox. Copilot makes these much easier to create because you can describe the rule in plain English.

Open Copilot Chat or Copilot in Outlook and type:

“Create a rule to categorize emails from my manager as Important.”

Or:

“Create a rule to move emails with ‘Invoice’ in the subject to my Invoices folder.”

Copilot will then show you the rule it plans to create and ask you to confirm it before anything changes.

Do keep in mind that the rules will apply to new incoming emails. They won’t reorganize messages already sitting in your inbox.

We all have data that is just scattered between notes, old documents and other work files. This is where Copilot in Word can save you time.

Here’s how:

What’s most useful in this feature is that you don’t have to turn a pile of information into a polished document yourself. Give Copilot the raw material, tell it what the finished document needs to accomplish, and then review what it produces.

You know the meeting where you vaguely remember an email from your coworker, someone definitely sent you a document, and you’re fairly sure a decision was made in Teams? Instead of hunting through three different apps to piece it all together, here’s what you can do:

Before your meeting, open a Copilot Chat and ask it to pull the relevant information together for you. Copilot can use work information you already have permission to access, including emails, Teams conversations, meetings, and files, to help you catch up in one place.

Try this prompt:

Summarize the documents, emails and Teams conversations involving [colleague name] that are relevant to our upcoming meeting. Highlight important decisions, open questions, action items and anything I should follow up on.

This is especially handy before a 1-on-1, project review, or your first meeting after a few days away.

This one runs on WorkIQ. In simple terms, that means Copilot uses the work context you have access to across MS Office, including emails, meetings, chats and files, to give you more relevant answers. That makes it especially useful for weekly reporting.

Try this prompt:

Review my emails, Teams chats, meetings and documents from the last 7 days. Create a one-page executive update with key achievements, current risks, decisions needed, upcoming milestones and recommended next steps.

If you use this every week, you can also schedule the prompt so Copilot runs it automatically. In Copilot Chat, hover over the prompt after you’ve run it, select “Schedule this prompt,” and choose when you want it to run.

Every Friday, you're likely pulling together a summary of the week: what you worked on, what moved forward, what's still pending. It's necessary, but it doesn't need to take up your afternoon.

Open Copilot in Teams or Outlook and prompt:

"Summarize my own activity across email, Teams, and files into accomplishments for a review or status update."

Copilot draws on your calendar and email history through WorkIQ, which already has context on your work, and produces a ready-to-send summary in seconds. Review it, make any adjustments, and send.

Got a Copilot question you can’t figure out? A prompt that isn’t giving you what you need? A feature you keep seeing but don’t quite understand?

Send it our way.

Reply to this email with your questions, and we'll answer them next week.