Microsoft is busy incorporating AI tools into its products, from web apps to Microsoft Edge and Windows 11. Copilot for Microsoft 365 targets the popular office suite, but is it worth the asking price right now?
What Is Copilot for Microsoft 365?
Copilot is an AI-powered assistant built into Windows and other Microsoft products and services. It can act as a chatbot, similar to ChatGPT, and an image creator like DALL-E. Some capabilities can vary between the products that support Copilot, but the basic functionality remains the same.
Copilot for Microsoft 365 takes those same AI powers and builds them into various Microsoft 365 apps like Word and Excel. The goal is to intelligently help you get what you're trying to get done more easily.
Of course, this isn't free. Copilot for Microsoft 365 currently costs $30 per user, per month, on top of your Microsoft 365 subscription.
What Standout Features Does Copilot for Microsoft 365 Add?
At the outset, Copilot for Microsoft 365 seems to excel (pardon the pun) at tasks that humans aren't big fans of. For example, Copilot can help intelligently sort your emails in Outlook. Is this much more useful than the basic auto-sort in the mobile Outlook app? Not really, but it's still handy.
Copilot for Microsoft 365 can also change how you interact with data in an Excel spreadsheet. Formulas are great, but being able to ask a question about another part of that data is genuinely useful. This is a feature that is bound to only get more powerful over time.
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If you're a frequent note-taker, the Copilot functionality in OneNote could be especially handy. For example, you can take notes during a meeting, then use Copilot to form them into a rough project plan you can flesh out later.
OneNote isn't the only area where Copilot's ability with words comes into play. For example, if you're not sure where to get started in a Word document, you can type up a few bullet points and use Copilot to get started. Copilot can also act as a super-powered grammar checker in Microsoft 365.
Which Microsoft 365 Apps Feature Copilot Support?
The Copilot for Microsoft 365 website lists the following apps as Copilot-enabled:
- Word
- PowerPoint
- Excel
- Outlook
- Teams
- Loop
However, this isn't the full story. The list omits OneNote, for a start, so you can't count on it as definitive.
It's likely that Copilot will start showing up in even more apps. As with Windows 11, you can expect Copilot features to grow fairly quickly in Microsoft 365.
Is Copilot for Microsoft 365 Right for You?
It's easy to imagine that we’ll one day rely on tools like Copilot, and those that evolve from it. That said, Copilot is currently most effective at summarizing information or breaking it out into more words. There are certainly cases when it could be useful, but it doesn't intelligently prioritize a task list based on your current work-in-progress documents just yet.
If you're an individual user—if you're not part of a large company using Microsoft 365—its pricing could also be off-putting. The $30 per month price tag isn't impossibly steep, but there is no free trial available at the time of writing. If you want to try Copilot for Microsoft 365 yourself, there's no way to do so other than to pay for a month of access.
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Well, that's not exactly true. Many of the features available as part of Copilot for Microsoft 365 are also available with a Copilot Pro subscription. You get plenty of features in Copilot Pro compared to Copilot, and this only costs $20 compared to the $30 per month for Copilot for Microsoft 365.
However, some features—especially those in more business-oriented apps—may only work with Copilot for Microsoft 365. It's hard to guess which features will belong to which subscription in the future.
For now, the best way to find out whether Copilot for Microsoft 365 works for you is to try it for a month. Otherwise, you can access many of the more interesting features with Copilot Pro.
