Microsoft announces Copilot Pages and new AI-driven productivity tools for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and others

Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft has announced new updates for its Microsoft 365 Copilot, focusing on enhancing productivity in PowerPoint, Word, Teams and other app using AI tools. As a part of the update, the company has introduced Copilot Pages and has added new features to Excel, PowerPoint, Word, OneDrive, Outlook and Teams.

The company says that these new Copilot features are aimed at offering better AI integration within these apps to offer a better workflow.

Copilot Pages is a new tool designed for collaborative AI-driven work. Pages serve as a persistent canvas for teams to interact with Copilot, bringing together content from various sources, including web data and files.

It enables real-time collaboration between humans and AI, turning all organisational content into reusable assets.

Copilot Pages will be available starting September 2024 for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers and will soon roll out to more than 400 million free Microsoft Copilot users with Microsoft Entra accounts.

Microsoft also highlighted updates to Copilot within its core 365 apps. In Excel, new features such as Copilot with Python are now available, enabling users to conduct advanced data analysis without coding. Excel users can work with unformatted data and utilise more formulas like XLOOKUP and SUMIF. This feature is available in public preview.

In PowerPoint, Copilot now includes a Narrative builder to help users create outlines that can be refined and turned into presentations. Brand manager tools ensure presentations are consistent with company branding, and additional support for organizational images will soon be available.

For Microsoft Teams, Copilot enhances meeting experiences by analyzing both spoken and chat-based conversations, offering a complete picture of discussions. It identifies unanswered questions and tracks key points from both spoken and written dialogue.

In Outlook, Copilot introduces a feature called Prioritise my inbox, which categorises emails based on relevance, role, and previous interactions. It summarises messages and helps users manage inbox overload by automatically identifying important topics, keywords, and contacts. This feature will be available in late 2024 as part of a public preview.

In Word, Copilot now integrates various sources such as web data, emails, and meetings into documents, streamlining the writing process. Copilot in OneDrive allows users to compare files and gather insights across multiple documents, saving time on manual searches. These updates will be available by the end of September 2024.