Thursday, 2:30 PM. An employee lets Copilot in Excel calculate the quarterly figures. The result looks professional. He hands the spreadsheet over to his colleague, who is preparing the weekly meeting. She accepts the figures without checking them – and why shouldn’t she? In the meeting, the sales manager stands up and presents the results. What nobody notices: Copilot used SUM instead of SUBTOTAL – and during subsequent filtering, it simply included the hidden rows in the count.
Only those who have mastered Excel can recognize such errors. Nevertheless, Microsoft promotes Copilot as if it would completely take over your employees’ work. In some Office applications, the AI actually works impressively well. In others, it delivers inconspicuous but costly errors. This course teaches your employees exactly how to make that distinction.
You will see where Copilot truly improves your productivity – and where it creates stumbling blocks for your employees. From time-saving features in OneNote, Word, and Teams to the alarming weaknesses in Excel: This course provides your employees with a realistic, practical look at the opportunities and limitations of AI in Microsoft Office.
Specifically, your employees will learn how to use Copilot effectively for text summaries, meeting minutes, and the lightning-fast creation of follow-up tasks in OneNote and Teams. They will learn how to reformat text in Word, expand bullet points into full sentences, add headings with a single click, and prepare content as attractive tables. And they will learn where it is better to avoid using Copilot in Excel – and why.
Office expert Holger Wöltje guides your employees through the course. He demonstrates best practices for rapid meeting follow-up with AI, shows how your employees can identify and navigate typical pitfalls, and explains how to use Copilot specifically where it offers genuine added value.
Show video transcript
Full transcript for the introductory video “Copilot for Microsoft 365 – Overview.”
Copilot for Microsoft 365? The Artificial Intelligence for Microsoft Office. In this video course, I will show you how to use AI support to process your emails, documents, and notes faster and more easily – once you have familiarized yourself with the specific characteristics of the system. A warm welcome, my name is Holger Wöltje.
For over 20 years, I have been helping people work more productively with Microsoft Office. Copilot now brings generative AI – which you have probably already tried out somewhere with ChatGPT or at least heard or read about – into Microsoft Office. In this course, I will show you how it all works and what you need to consider when applying it in practice. How is it integrated into the individual applications? What can Copilot do? What can’t it do, and where can you find it?
As is often the case with Microsoft, it is not quite that simple because different applications have very similar names. For example, there is a “Copilot” that comes with Bing Search, the Edge browser, or Windows. There is “Copilot Pro,” which you can subscribe to as a private user for a fee, and there is “Copilot for Microsoft 365,” which is what this course is about.
This is the version that your company books as a paid add-on subscription to Office 365. Microsoft itself often simply calls it “Copilot” to avoid repeating the long name, but it differs significantly from the “Copilot” that comes free with Windows. This version can do a bit more, is superbly integrated into all Office applications, and also has access to your company data. We will take a close look at that.
By the way, “Copilot Pro” for private customers works similarly, has similar capabilities, and of course has no access to your company data. You can now find the option to call up this Copilot in various places. For example, in the web apps – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote for the Web. And fortunately, also in the Office 365 desktop apps, the version installed locally on your PC. Outlook 365, for example, has a button for summarizing your emails.
And Word has this cute little Copilot icon directly in the document. If you call up Copilot from here, it can make changes to the document and work directly with the text you have currently selected. So, if you have selected a paragraph with three clicks, you can rewrite it directly here. At the same time, you also have a Copilot button here in Word that opens it in the sidebar to the right of the document. There you can ask general questions that you need as background information while writing your document, and also ask questions about the content of the file.
However, it cannot edit the document content from there. We will look at all of this again in detail for each specific application, with a few examples of the great things you can do with it. For now, just be aware: you will encounter Copilot in several places, and depending on where and how you call it up, it has different capabilities – or you might even be facing a different Copilot altogether.
In the Edge browser sidebar, for example, you have the general internet search. You can use Copilot to generate images that you might want to use for a press release or a company newsletter. You can also speak to Copilot instead of typing, use your microphone, and upload images for analysis. If you now toggle this small switch at the top from Web to Work, you suddenly no longer have the standard Copilot, but Copilot for Microsoft 365, which can access your company data, your emails, your calendar, Teams conversations, and all files shared with you on SharePoint.
Of course, it cannot access other company data that you do not have access to yourself. For this reason, Copilot for Microsoft 365 currently lacks the functions from the standard Copilot here at the bottom, such as microphone input in the browser or adding images and screenshots. We will look at this more closely later. We are currently still at the overview of where you encounter Copilot and how to call it up. If you select text anywhere in the browser, you get a small Copilot icon and can work directly with the selected text from there, for example, to have it summarized. Or, if you work in systems like a contact management system that you access via a browser, you can edit the text directly.
You can therefore also use Copilot in third-party applications that are not from Microsoft, provided you can operate them via a web interface in the browser. This is because you have it integrated there. That was Microsoft’s Edge web browser, which, by the way, has been my favorite web browser since late 2023. Just like in Outlook and Word, you now also have Copilot for Microsoft 365 in the desktop app of OneNote – the local version installed on your PC. In OneNote, for example, you can call up Copilot directly via the right-click context menu. And this continues through all Office applications.
In the next videos, we will look in more detail at the possibilities Copilot offers in each application, which of these Copilots you need for what, and what typical use cases look like. We will see how it can support you in your daily work. I will also show you a few examples of what you need to watch out for. These AI functions enable a new way of working. This is always sold to us as the future and something fantastic, and I am also convinced that Copilot can truly change and simplify your work.
However, it’s not as if everything is suddenly faster, easier, and half as stressful as yesterday with the snap of a finger. Unfortunately, quite the opposite is true. Microsoft marketing fails to mention this, while they – and some bloggers who quickly create a post based on what Microsoft writes in its marketing without considering practical application – might give you the impression that you can now use it to create great results in no time on topics that are completely new to you and about which you have no idea.
They fail to tell you that much of what they promise is a) partly not yet technically functional. And b) a relatively large portion of the things that do work are not directly usable in practice in the form delivered by Copilot. This naturally leads to high levels of frustration. You might doubt yourself or think: “What does my IT department or my company want from me? If they present it to us like this, what’s the point?” In recent months, I have seen many people give up in annoyance and simply ignore Copilot. And that is a shame. Because Copilot really offers you the chance for a new way of working. It usually generates texts that are completely free of spelling and grammar errors, which look really good at first glance and sound sophisticated, and which are sometimes truly excellent.
I’m just telling you clearly and upfront: the problem is that these generated texts are sometimes incomplete and do not contain important information. Instead, they contain false statements that are simply incorrect or even the total opposite of the correct statement – regarding things that are important to you and your customers. Or there are completely useless side topics included. Copilot sometimes simply produces rubbish that reads as if it were true and good.
Sometimes it’s particularly nasty rubbish, even if it’s just one line hidden in three pages of good text. Not always, but unfortunately time and again. This is especially dangerous when you rely on something. Something that worked perfectly ten times, continues to go well for the next one to nine times, but then every eleventh to twentieth time is wrong or incomplete, leading to serious consequences for customer satisfaction, operational safety, your results, or documentation requirements. We will look at this more closely in the following videos. And that was the bad news. Let me say it clearly once more: working with Copilot initially means more work. And you must know even better how the software works that is supposed to take over steps for you.
Otherwise, it will present you with complete nonsense that might only be identified as faulty later on. The good news I have for you is: if you know the software you are working with and know what to watch out for in practice, it will take a little time to get used to working with Copilot at first. But after that, it can help you complete the tedious, boring, stupid, and time-consuming steps on the way to your result much faster and more easily in the future.
What your employees will learn in this course
- Copilot in Office 365: Overview & Application Possibilities
- Overview: The various versions and licensing models
- How to call up Copilot in the various Office 365 applications
- Caution – Pitfall: Strengths and weaknesses of AI in everyday work
- Effectively minuting meetings and extracting follow-up tasks in a flash with Copilot in OneNote
- Having summaries and follow-up tasks created with Copilot
- Why you MUST ALWAYS check the result: where which errors occur
- Practical tips, verification & correction, Copilot in the sidebar
- Transcribing Teams meetings and using Copilot during the meeting
- Transcription in Microsoft Teams (with participant consent)
- Transcription without video recording (both possible if required)
- How to use Copilot effectively during the meeting
- From transcript to finished minutes: Best practices for effective post-processing
- Accessing Teams transcripts later and asking Copilot about the content
- Copying as text to OneNote, exporting as a Word document or subtitle file
- Caution: Do NOT rely on the summary if you were not present yourself – best practices for rapid post-processing
- Copilot in Excel: For professionals only, still too many errors
- Multiple errors in simple tasks – and why you should not use Copilot without good Excel skills
- Caution – Pitfall: Consequential errors in sums – use SUBTOTAL
- How to be faster without Copilot
- Copilot in Word: Processing texts significantly faster and more effectively
- Correcting conversion and spelling errors, having texts rewritten
- Simplifying texts as tables or bulleted lists – also directly when pasting
- Formulating text from bullet points, adding headings, and reformatting in a flash
Who this course is designed for
You have introduced Microsoft 365 in your company. Your employees have Copilot licenses or will receive them soon. And you want to prevent Copilot from costing time instead of saving it – because employees press the button but do not recognize when the result is correct and when it is not.
Then this course is the right choice. It is aimed at employees with standard Office skills who want to integrate Copilot confidently into their daily work – without marketing promises, but with real examples from 25 years of seminar practice. Your employees do not need any prior AI knowledge. What they should bring: a desire to take away a wealth of solid practical tips in 70 to 80 minutes of video runtime.
Your instructor
Holger Wöltje has been testing Microsoft 365 and Copilot in his consulting mandates since the first beta. In this course, he shares what has proven successful from these tests and from working with his clients – and which AI functions you and your employees are better off ignoring in everyday office life. Learn more about Holger Wöltje →
Do my employees need prior knowledge for the Copilot course?
Why do you advise against using Copilot in Excel?
We do not advise against it fundamentally – but we are honest: Copilot repeatedly makes errors in Excel even with simple tasks that a beginner will not recognize. It finds the wrong columns. It uses SUM where SUBTOTAL would be correct, and simply adds up hidden rows. In some evaluations, the result is still correct by chance – in others, it leads to costly wrong decisions.
This leads to a simple conclusion: you need solid Excel skills to be able to recognize whether Copilot is working correctly at all. And if your employees master Excel well enough to confidently check Copilot results, they are almost always faster without Copilot. In other words: those who truly know Excel prefer to do it themselves. Those who do not know Excel well enough to control Copilot should first learn how Excel works – otherwise, they are inviting the sorcerer’s apprentice into the house.
Does Copilot make our Office training redundant?
On the contrary. There are two reasons why solid Office skills are more important today than ever before.
Review the course at your convenience before deciding Those who do not understand Excel will not recognize when Copilot delivers a faulty evaluation. Those who do not know how a PowerPoint slide is properly structured – with design templates and master slides – cannot judge whether the AI has implemented it correctly. Those who do not know that Word relies on style templates for tables of contents and cross-references will set up the document incorrectly and provide the wrong prompts.
Second: With Office knowledge, you are faster than Copilot in many places – using keyboard shortcuts, knowing where functions are located, and having established workflows. Faster than formulating a prompt, waiting for the result, checking it, and then implementing it. Copilot only becomes truly powerful when your employees know where to use it sensibly – and where they themselves continue to be faster. The course demonstrates exactly this combination.
Which Copilot license do my employees need for the course?
The course refers to the paid Copilot for Microsoft 365 (currently approx. €30 per user per month). This version is deeply integrated into the desktop and web apps and has access to your company data in OneNote, Teams, SharePoint, etc. The free version “Copilot Chat” has a different range of functions and is covered in a separate course.
How up-to-date is the content – doesn’t Microsoft change Copilot constantly?
True – and that is exactly why we keep the courses up to date. We regularly review the content and adapt course sections when Microsoft moves or adds functions. The focus is on the working methods and mindsets with which your employees confidently categorize Copilot results – these remain stable even if Microsoft moves buttons on the interface.
Can we integrate the course into our own LMS?
Yes. You will receive the video courses SCORM and xAPI compatible for your own Learning Management System. Alternatively, we can provide you with our platform – upon request with a dedicated clone for your company. We can briefly discuss which option suits you best.
Review the course at your leisure before you decide
Before your company books employee licenses, you and your colleagues from HR, IT, or management should review the course at your convenience. Request a free demo access – you will receive the full Copilot course for viewing, with no obligation and no credit card required. We will get back to you within one business day with your access and answer your questions regarding LMS integration and the appropriate licensing model for your number of employees.
P.S.: Microsoft has invested hundreds of millions in Copilot advertising. The image of AI handling everything itself has reached your employees’ minds. But it’s simply not true everywhere. Those who use Copilot blindly produce errors in Excel and elsewhere that no one can find – but which end up on the table at the next quarterly meeting. This course shows your employees where they can trust the AI and where they need to look more closely. That is the difference between “Copilot introduced” and “Copilot productively in use.”
P.P.S.: Goethe’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice comes to mind when you see employees today handling Copilot in Excel: “The spirits that I called, I cannot now dismiss.” We help your employees avoid exactly this situation.
