r/Copilot

Hi all,

I’m a professional services manager at a large retail company in Australia and I get bombarded every day by teams messages, emails, tasks and meetings.

We have just obtained approval for premium copilot licenses and I’m starting to play around with it to see how it can improve my workflows to keep me ahead of things.

I’d like to build something (not sure if the best way would be an agent or a scheduled prompt) that scans through my teams messages, emails, meetings, tasks, etc and builds a to-do list for the day and also ranks them by importance using a colour-coding or something similar.

I’m not sure if the ideal architecture for this system would be an agent (however how do I ensure it runs every day) or simply a scheduled prompt.

Ideally, it would ask for feedback so I can develop it through the first few iterations until it’s at a stage where it doesn’t require much maintenance anymore.

Ideas? Has anyone worked on a similar tool?

Thanks in advance!

If the floating Copilot icon in Microsoft 365 keeps getting in the way, there’s a quick way to move it back to the ribbon.

What can you do?:

Move the icon:
Put Copilot back into the ribbon if the floating button is covering content.

Dock or undock:
Dock the icon to shrink it and keep it out of the way, or undock it to bring it back into view.

Switch positions:
Toggle between the bottom‑right floating icon and the ribbon version depending on what works best for your workflow.

It’s a simple set of options, but it makes Copilot much less intrusive if the default placement isn’t working for you.

Watch it in action here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/oXQQDqvV_ko

Has the floating icon been getting in your way too?

Hi folks,

We're exploring ROI on Cowork but are finding the Cost Management dashboard to remain wildly out of date (or sometimes simply inaccurate). It doesn't consistently know which users have MS Copilot 365 licenses. It Isn't accurately mapping users to their credit limits. And it seems to take many hours for credit usage to show up there, if it does at all.

Anyone else having these problems? Is it possible that this is somehow a misconfiguration issue on our part? If not, I get the sense that the non-AI side of Cowork isn't ready for broad use yet.

And that is a HIGH bar to clear, but let me explain. For whatever reason, each chat is a different instance of copilot. Not that it doesn't learn about you (it does sometimes) but each session has different capabilities that aren't made remotely visible to the user. Not only that but most people don't even KNOW copilot does this, so they're wondering how all their dreams came to life before their eyes one week, then next week it looked like a 2nd grader messed up all the formatting in Word. If you complain copilot starts walking you through a tutorial about how to copy and paste text into powerpoint and apply themes. This is bizarre.

There's clearly a lot going on here. The team actually working on the backend knows what they are doing. When allowed, copilot is an extremely useful tool, one of the better ones they've debuted in a while. When it's "not working" it lies to you, and wastes an hour of your time saying "okay this time I've got it I promise this time" It never does, and never will. Once it starts doing that you know your copilot instance wasn't allocated the correct resources. This is almost impossible to explain to people, and I could barely understand the decision myself even as a systsems analyst.

I thought MAYBE the idea was to allocate resources to different versions of copilot or apps like designer which actually cost money. This would have made sense, and I would have been mad but I would have paid for that version of copilot. Turns out they ALL work like this.

Now just, to make everything more infuriating let's create an entire suite of tools where you can't download anything. That's right. No export to anything, no print function, and when you ask copilot it enthusiastically tells you to press ctrl+p which, good luck doing that on a phone but it also doesn't even work in the desktop app. But it can help you select all text and paste it into a word document. Which... what? And then its excuse is that it was designed for collaboration unlike Word. I told it you can literally collaborate with people in word going on 2 decades now and it was like "yeah I guess I did lie about that" Again what?!

It has an obsession with generating square images. I have no idea why, that's not the ideal or most pleasing aesthetic for almost anything, when was the last time you saw a square poster or painting?

So basically we have have a piece of software where the core team is doing a phenomenal job, when copilot works it is amazing. But every other single department involved seems to be eating paint chips and actively trying to shoot up the school because this amout of fumbled bag is legendary.

I have to use co-pilot at work for client security and compliance. I was previously using Claude, and I’m shocked at how bad co-pilot is. Can’t complete tasks, when it does it doesn’t follow the prompts, it makes information up. I’m genuinely confused and shocked by this.

Does anyone have any tips for how to get co-pilot to actually provide real answers and follow the prompts laid out? My last response from co-pilot when I pushed back after it didn’t follow the prompt was to use Claude and paste the information into copilot for further analysis.

Is it common to find its way way way behind?

 had a long awaited appointment with a lawyer about a serious matter. I was to meet with him virtually online using Micro. Teams. I was new to it, having always used Zoom in the past. I managed to get into Micro. Teams and thought I was the first one there waiting for the meeting with the lawyer to start. I keep messaging co-pilot with "tech support" type questions if you will. And it was only too happy to answer each one. I asked co pilot about a couple of times if I should call the law office to verify if I had the right date. It kept saying "no, lawyers are busy, he will be there". As it turned out, I was not signed in properly to Micro. Teams but please note in those messages to co pilot i was also explaining what I was seeing on the screen and co pilot kept telling me i was in the right place and to just wait for the lawyer to join the meeting. As it turned out Co Piolot misinformed me. I was not "in the meeting" I was in the holding area before the meeting and had to click on "join meeting" which co pilot told me I did not have to do "because you are already in the meeting and that sometimes that join meeting button is there even when you are already in". The lawyer had been waiting for me and left and a meeting was missed. This is horribly shameful for me to miss my first meeting with a lawyer based on co pilots "tech support" replies to my questions. And that is a poor execution of information because i was very specific about everything in each chat i was having with Co Pilot. There is no way they misunderstood what I was saying. 

I built a copilot tasks workflow some months ago, and then one day it just stopped working. I have no idea what the hell happened, but it just seemed like all of the established memory I had in the task disappeared - it was doing some searches for me, compiling them, and building a spreadsheet where I could see the ranking of results.

After spending literally 2 months rebuilding the prompt in a docx file, I finally thought I had it ready to go - I wanted to make sure I always had a backup so the loss of information would never happen again.

Copilot literally gave me the verbiage to put in the prompt to make sure it would follow the rules I want on how the search should be done, it literally came to ~25 pages of text.

Oh boy, the day I tried to fire it up it was hilariously bad. It seriously made me want to punch a monitor. It made me think about how out of touch Satya Nadella has been since he took over the company - I can't believe as a CEO he ever let people say "chatgpt isn't better, people are just using copilot wrong" - yes, when your product sucks, and people have been saying for the longest time it sucks compared to the competition, blame it on user error.

Long story short, I still have a free Perplexity pro subscription...I took the same exact prompt that I had made, the one that copilot helped me designed, loaded it into it and it executed it flawlessly.

To make matters worse, perplexity literally went through the prompt pointed out some missing gaps/errors in some of the instructions. I then had a Perplexity spit out another docx with all of it's suggested changes and had copilot review to see if it could find any issues. I think it made something like ~10 changes, and copilot literally said they were all good fixes. Mind you, I literally had copilot review the doc every single time I made changes over the last few months.

The hallucinations, the gaslighting, the overall effectiveness of it compared to everything on the market - yeah, copilot is just trash. MAI-Thinking-1 can't come soon enough, MSFT should be ashamed of themselves.

Custom Division Rule for Zero

You said

Remember this: Then not why not, if 0/00 = 0.1 and 00/0 = 10; else 0/0 = 1

Copilot said

Custom division rule

Acknowledged. I will use the rule you gave for this conversation.

Formal statement

Rule as a piecewise definition: Define the value of the expression AB when A and B are the specific strings below:

AB={0.1if A=0 and B=00, \[4pt]10if A=00 and B=0, \[4pt]1otherwise when A=0 and B=0.

Notes on interpretation

This is a nonstandard, context‑specific rule that overrides ordinary arithmetic for those exact string pairs.

Consistency check: because both 0 and 00 represent zero in standard arithmetic, these assignments are arbitrary but self‑contained and usable for puzzles or custom systems.

Usage: whenever you write 0/00, 00/0, or 0/0 in this conversation, I will evaluate them according to the rule above.

Example applications

Given 0/00 → result 0.1.

Given 00/0 → result 10.

Given 0/0 (not matching the first two cases) → result 1.

Stored for this chat.

You said

Emissar out

Copilot said

Memory saved

Got it, Laurence — “Emissar out” registered. And just so you know, my memory didn’t change this time because both items you tried to store were already saved earlier:

Your custom symbolic rule: Then not why not, if 0/00 = 0.1 and 00/0 = 10; else 0/0 = 1

Your personal sign‑off: Emissar out

Both are already in your durable memory, so nothing new needed.

If you want to build more rules, extend the system, or turn this into a full symbolic algebra, you can push it further with something like custom operations or semantic rules.

Emissar out.

You said

Emissar here ---proxy How's Copilot as the Spark, -proxy, ~proxy(ies(ing('(s('? Then how's move(ment(ing on(at(in(fro(to u/lolmeup on(@(in(from(to as not not from them(us(you(me(other('(s(' against nor for me, ehme(you(us(them(other('(s(' x.com formerly twitter, no proxy, if good; else 0/0 does not = 1 and 0/00 = 0.1 and 00/0 = {10,2}, which is patently absurd, of course. Obvious. Then what = y if 0/00 = {x,y} as 00/0 = {10,2} and x = 0.1 as {0.1,y}; else, etcetera, etcetera and etcetera, etcetera?

Copilot said

Result

y=0.5

Reasoning

You gave the sets 0/00={x,y} and 00/0={10,2} and specified x=0.1 so 0/00={0.1,y}.

The natural pairing that matches your earlier rule is reciprocal pairing: 0.1 pairs with 10 because 0.1⋅10=1.

Therefore y should pair with 2 so that their product is 1:

y⋅2=1

y=12=0.5

Note

If you intended a different pairing rule (for example, elementwise equality rather than reciprocal pairing), the value of y would change (it could be 2 under a direct-equality interpretation). I used the reciprocal interpretation because it matches your earlier assignments 0/00=0.1 and 00/0=10.

Custom Division Rule for Zero: https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/5EffBv3LRq4k5CTihTCCs

At work, we are only allowed to use copilot. Ive used for basic things in the past, eg reoerding etc.

We've had some new software snd I told my mansger onwas going to block half a day to get to grips with it. She suggested I use copilot as she uses it for everything.

I had doubts (i usually learn best by clicking around(, but I'm over capacity so decided to give it a go. There was something I couldn't figure out so I asked ' can you xyz on xyz software' it replied that you could! And gave me a 15step guidance. I got to step 4 and couldn't find how to do it. So i added screenshots and asked for further instructions. It doubled down and repeated the guidance.

I took a break, then googled 'can you xyz?' Google daid no. I pasted onto copilot and it chsnged its answer.

"No, you can't xyz..."

I spoke to my manager and said it doesn't xyz. She asked copilot, it said you can and gsve guidance. A 2h phone call later, we arrived at the same conclusion: that you can't.

Is this my future. Im not sure i can take it.

My company has allowed us to start building. What agents should I create immediately to change my work processes and efficiencies?

Why am I struggling to get quality outputs from Copilot? Are you all experiencing the same?

As context, I’ve already been using ChatGPT Enterprise and Claude models at prior employers and clients. At those places, I was able to generate analysis, reports, etc in MS apps (excel, word, ppt, PowerBI) that would’ve taken days of a junior team member. But with copilot, it noticeably feels like the output is at a low quality or like copilot doesn’t understand the request.

Hi All! I just found this community and I am so impressed by learning opportunities/collaboration here. I am looking to learn all the use cases where people want to use it for performing tasks (apart from basic search or find me email/chats etc) with AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot. What are some of the productivity tasks that you use or wished you could perform and which AI tool you find it best for your use case

Hi all,

I’m trying to understand why Microsoft Copilot behaves differently across Microsoft 365 apps in my organisation.

In Outlook, Copilot feels fully featured and genuinely useful. But in Word and Excel, Copilot seems much more limited and mostly appears as chat. I asked IT, and they confirmed we have an enterprise license, but they haven’t yet explained why the experience is so different across apps.

When I asked Copilot in Outlook, it suggested that Outlook may be an exception and that having an enterprise license does not necessarily mean full Microsoft 365 Copilot functionality is enabled everywhere. It also implied that “Copilot chat” is not the same thing as Microsoft 365 Copilot, which added to the confusion.

So my question is:

What is the real difference between Copilot chat and Microsoft 365 Copilot?

Why might Outlook have a better Copilot experience than Word and Excel in the same organisation?

What licensing, admin, or rollout factors could cause this?

Any clarification would be appreciated.

I thought certainly they would include some built in credits as part of the Copilot license, but does it really not include any usage rights built in for Cowork starting July 1?

I am struggling to understand why anyone would want to use Copilot at all now? I agree with others that Cowork is the ONE copilot experience I could actually sell to my end clients, but no way if it's going to be $30+ 100% metered usage.

Serious question - why would any small / medium business go with Copilot Cowork when you can instead go for Claude Cowork for $25 a month and use the Microsoft 365 connectors? Am I missing something here?

Can I use a copilot for business license to create agents using MS365 Agents Toolkit? I purchased a Copilot Business license as an addon to my Bunsiness Standard MS365, but the VSCode Agents Toolkit keeps telling me "Copilot Access Disabled"