r/microsoft_365_copilot

Been exploring what's realistically possible with our M365 Copilot licenses in a consumer goods FP&A setting. No ERP connector approved so I'm working within the standard stack, mostly Excel and whatever Copilot Studio can do without live system integrations.

Curious what others have actually built and use regularly. A few things I've been thinking about:

On the Excel side: are you using it to write or audit formulas, generate variance commentary, or help structure models? I'm genuinely curious whether it holds up on messier, real-world spreadsheets or if it's mostly impressive in demos and frustrating in practice.

On the automation side: has anyone put together a simple Copilot Studio agent for something like routing close inputs, flagging missing submissions, or drafting a standard accrual memo? I'd love to know how long it took to build and whether people actually ended up using it.

I'm putting together an internal business case and want to go in with real examples rather than marketing material. Even partial wins or honest 'it didn't really work' experiences would be super helpful.

What's worked for you?

As a solo entrepreneur who just wants to try out Microsoft Copilot, and Cowork, and its other AI capabilities, but I don't need image generation etc. Where is the cheapest place to buy that on a monthly rolling basis and what tier would I be looking at?

Thank you!

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!

Interested in others who've compared running the same tasks with the same data and models in both claude and copilot cowork. Microsoft said it's 30-40% cheaper but we are finding that is absolutely false marketing. Our users are blowing through their limits the first day in copilot cowork. I've been running the same tasks across both platforms for comparison and everything costs drastically more in copilot cowork than it does in claude cowork.
What are you all seeing at your companies?
Please make sure you are voicing the feedback to your account teams at Microsoft.

Looks like the spam bots are back, isn't this the reason why Reddit moved away from allowing API access / third party access? The bots are back, and it all sucks.

Microsoft shouldn’t be getting away with the pay model change. Especially after duping Enterprise into providing all of their sensitive information with these “security” arrangements they made to make copilot attractive to enterprise/commercial

On a side note, if you don’t think that Microsoft is actively parsing all of this data they claim to be secured in “safe environments”, you’re a fool. That’s a conversation for another day.

I work at a subsidiary to one of the largest insurance brokerages in the world, I was hired relatively recently. At first I was dismissive of copilot, but due to security rules at my company, I’m unable to use any other AI platforms with work data. So I learned co-pilot and realized that Microsoft was actually building something useful for enterprise, especially with the automation/cowork/scout plans on the horizon.

I’m in the office telling all of the boomers (no disrespect) in my office, who would otherwise never use AI - about how useful it is, and how I can use cowork and agent publishing to automate a ton of the menial tasks we do on the day to day - slowly getting confidence from the older crowd of our office about how AI can actually be beneficial to them (just the excel, word, outlook, PowerPoint integration was blowing their minds) and I hadn’t even shown them the real meat and potatoes.

My next step was showing them the real power through co-work, but now how do I approach management and tell them “yeah the whole pricing scheme of subscription is over starting this month, it’s subscription + metered usage billing, and will vary user to user”

None of these people, especially the older crowd are going to give this a serious chance now - and I don’t blame them.

Microsoft clearly made it their mission to co-opt commercial/enterprise, heavily subsidized to create the facade that these offering are sustainable, and the moment these major players start plugging in their sensitive data, connecting API’s and integrating their systems into their network - they 10x (or more) the price.

Seems like a scam to me, thoughts?

I’m working on a small project to adapt a statistical analysis skill for use inside ChatGPT in Excel.

The original skill came from Claude and already had a solid statistical foundation. It covered descriptive statistics, trend analysis, outlier detection, and hypothesis testing. However, when I started testing it in a spreadsheet environment, I noticed a gap.

The answers were often technically reasonable, but not always structured in a way that was useful for a business analyst, financial analyst, or FP&A user working inside Excel.

The goal is not to turn Excel into an academic statistics lab. The goal is to make statistical reasoning more usable for real business cases. The biggest area I started refining was hypothesis testing. With Business cases like:

• Comparing sales performance between two segments
• Testing before/after changes after a training, promotion, or process improvement
• Comparing conversion rates
• Checking whether two categorical variables are related
• Identifying outliers or unusual business behavior
• Explaining whether a difference is likely real or just normal business noise

I expanded the workflow so the skill does not immediately jump into a statistical test. Instead, it should first interpret the business question, identify the correct type of comparison, define the null and alternative hypotheses in plain language, check assumptions, select the right test, and then produce a structured business-readable conclusion.

The main question I wanted to answer is:

“Can AI help a business, data or finance analyst choose the right statistical method, explain it clearly, and turn the result into a better business decision?

This project is still an early iteration. I consider the hypothesis testing part finish, And I just finished correlation. Thanks to using AI, the project is moving fairly fast. Future improvements may include regression workflows, more finance-oriented examples, and better output formatting for spreadsheet-based reporting.

If you are interested in learning to apply statististics to bussines cases, You may like this project. I honestly can said that I have learn and undertood more statistics by working on this porject than the 2 times I have tried to learn statistics academically (for Psychology and my MBA.)

I want to invite people to join and participate in this project. We could use people to:

• Test the skill in your own bussines cases, and sharing if the answer where strong and appropiate
• Help include other statistical areas, like Regression or probability
• GIve ideas, suggestion or comments on how to make this skill more useful.

interested? please give me your feedback. I am using a open source license for the proyect. This mean you can use it, fork it, or modified to suit your needs. As a Excel user for more than 15 years and a and BI analyst for 10, I am very interested in your opinion on this. If you want to inspect the project repo, and download the skill, you can find it by googling: github Ogzapatah1 statistical-analysis-skill-for-excel

I tracked my Cowork usage for the week or so between the GA announcement and consumption billing taking effect. Here’s a summary of what I did and the associated costs:

🟢 Light Tasks (100–300 credits)

Anonymise ticket data (Run 1) 🎫

• Prompt: Anonymise two ticket extracts.
• Sources: 2 x Excel files
• Outputs: 2 x Excel files
• Credits: 38.3 | PAYG Cost: £0.381

Anonymise ticket data (Run 2) 🎫 Prompt: Anonymise two ticket extracts (repeat exercise).

• Sources: 2 x Excel files
• Outputs: 2 x Excel files
• Credits: 36.8 | PAYG Cost: £0.371

Create Web App – Follow-up refinement 🌐 Prompt: Build a self-contained, company branded HTML landing page ("Modern Work Resources") linking to five hosted assets, designed so links can be edited directly in a simple list at the top of the file (no Cowork credits needed for future updates). Applied company brand skill and natural-voice skill.

• Outputs: Single static HTML file for Azure static site hosting
• Credits: 142.4 | PAYG Cost: £1.421 🟡 Medium Tasks (400–700 credits)

**Create SOW – Federated Identity Pilot (Customer A – Media group) **📄 Prompt: Build a Statement of Work for a federated identity migration pilot. Context included a problem summary, recommended federated identity approach, details of the acquired US business (Google Workspace estate: Sheets, Docs/Slides, Zapier, Voice, Meet, Streak), and a ROM previously produced. Used /mwpresales and /natural-voice skills against the MW SOW template.

• Sources: 1 x Excel, 2 x Word
• Credits: 513 | PAYG Cost: £5.131
• Create SOW – Cloud Kerberos Trust

**(Customer B – Managed Services) **📄 Prompt: Plan and produce a SOW for enabling Windows Hello for Business Cloud Kerberos Trust so users can log in with PIN and still have mapped drives connect (issue arose after some servers moved to Azure). Used /mwpresales and /natural-voice skills, referencing Microsoft Learn documentation.

• Sources: 1 x Word
• Credits: 651 | PAYG Cost: £6.511

🔴 Heavy Tasks (>700 credits)

Refine Pricing Calculator – M365 Support Service 💷 Prompt: Review prior session notes (v0.8 calculator), the refined v3 model, the data sheet, and SED for the new M365 Support Service. Used /product-manager skill to plan refinement to v0.9.

• Sources: 2 x Markdown, 1 x Excel, 2 x Word
• Credits: 725.2 | PAYG Cost: £7.251

**Create Web App – COP Onboarding Portal (initial build) **🌐 Prompt: Create an onboarding webpage/app for the Cloud Optimisation Platform, allowing customers to choose M365, Azure, or both. Referenced onboarding guides and data sheet; modelled on an existing onboarding HTML example. Used the /natural-voice skill.

• Sources: 3 x PDF, 1 x HTML
• Credits: 798.1 | PAYG Cost: £7.98 Note (your comment): "511 initial build, 798.1 once refined, did include a failed task that I had to stop."1 Create Web Page – M365 Support Services promo page 🌐 Prompt: Build a customer-facing webpage promoting the new M365 Support Services using company branding (with the top-right banner notch removed) and the natural-voice skill. Referenced presentation, data sheet, and SED.
• Sources: 1 x PowerPoint, 2 x Word
• Credits: 977.5 | PAYG Cost: £9.78 Note (your comment): "Plus a lot of back and forth including tech discussion that could have happened in a separate chat."1

Ticket Analysis – M365 Support Service pricing model 📊 Prompt: Analyse ticket data from five anonymised customers (varying user sizes from sub-50 to 2000 users; mix of full service and escalation only) to understand how much work relates to tenant maintenance vs user support/changes, and whether tenant size correlates with monthly maintenance effort. Interview-style engagement using /mwpresales and /product-manager skills.

• Sources: 5 x Excel, 2 x Word, 1 x Markdown
• Outputs: 1 x Excel, 1 x Markdown, 1 x HTML
• Credits: 1,840.5 | PAYG Cost: £18.41

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.

One thing we've noticed is that many organizations are excited to roll out Microsoft Copilot but skip reviewing their Microsoft 365 permissions first. Since Copilot works within the permissions users already have, we've found it's a good opportunity to clean up access before enabling AI.

Things like:

• SharePoint permissions
• Teams access
• Sensitive HR or finance files
• DLP and Purview policies
• Conditional Access and MFA

We've seen that governance often has a bigger impact on a successful rollout than the AI itself.

Curious how everyone else approached it. Did you review permissions before enabling Copilot, or did governance come afterward? Any lessons learned?

For organizations using Microsoft 365 Copilot/Cowork with consumption-based billing, how are you providing credit usage visibility directly to end users?

Today, we can see usage from the admin side through Azure and M365 reporting, but users have no easy way to answer:

• How many credits have I used today?
• Which agents or sessions consumed those credits?
• How close am I to any organizational limits or budgets?

Has anyone implemented a self-service dashboard or reporting solution that gives users visibility into their cumulative daily usage instead of only showing per-session consumption?

I'd appreciate screenshots, architecture examples, data sources, or lessons learned from real-world deployments.

I posted a legitimate complaint about OneNote's new embedded table/Copilot layout breaking the note-taking experience (images and links stopped working, table/Copilot now dominate the page instead of supporting notes). Instead of a response addressing the issue, my account on Microsoft's own Q&A/Answers forum got suspended, and my comment was deleted "due to a violation of the Code of Conduct" — with no specifics on what I actually violated.

I wasn't abusive. I wasn't spamming. I described a real product regression as a paying/long-term user. The message just said it was "manually reported or identified through automated detection," which tells me nothing.

This feels less like moderation and more like a company shutting down criticism it doesn't want to deal with. It's a lot easier to suspend the person reporting a bug than to fix the bug. If this is how Microsoft handles product feedback, it explains a lot about why real issues sit unresolved for years while forums fill with the same complaints on repeat. Has anyone else been suspended from Microsoft's forums for reporting a legitimate issue? Curious how common this is.

Even shut me up on Reddit, is freedom of speech real here? @Reddit

Copilot performs super consistently though

https://preview.redd.it/4ilfehyy0vah1.png?width=880&format=png&auto=webp&s=6bca992896ffce0d0d75549494c888a7bb660957

I've been promoted into a leadership role at my organization. I want to use AI to help with tracking and facilitating one on one meetings with my team members. I was doing this with a Claude Project, but the organization wants all meeting management done via AI to be in our internal Copilot instance.

So far I've learned that Notebooks are the closest thing Copilot has analogous to a Project. What I'm not sure of is if I can setup the conversations in a Notebook to be self-contained, or if conversations all tie in together. What I want to do is upload the transcript of each one on one to a conversation specific to that team member and then keep using that conversation for meeting prep. It seems, however, that unless I have reference material in the notebook I'm unable to chat with it (regardless of uploading a file to the conversation). The alternative would be one Notebook per team member.

Secondary to this would be the want to have an Agent run on each transcript upload. It would run a summary prompt, add it to the collective knowledge of the conversation (or Notebook), and then create a Loop page that is shared with the team member for collaboration prior to the next one on one meeting. 

I've tried searching for anyone that has a writeup that would work like this, but I'm coming up short. Any help in guidance on the best practice for doing this would be appreciated.

At this point, there are only 2 possible answers:

Answer 1: Anthropic is in the middle of a bait-and-switch with Microsoft to lure customers (including enterprise customers) away from Microsoft by neutering the roll out because they think MS people will basically say “Copilot already does this, you just need to know how to use it” and “Anthropic is a highly complicated infrastructure” (neither of which solve the problem).

Answer 2: Microsoft simply botched the CoWork Agent rollout in basically every phase that clients can see and feel.

- First, being buggy was okay because it was “free” (not really) and in Frontier.
- Then, it was the “Of course it’s not included in your monthly subscription cost” (unlike other MS 365 Agents).
- Then, it was “We don’t have any enterprise quality tiers with fixed pricing for teams of up to 75 like Anthropic does”.
- Then it was “Just try it out now that it’s out of Frontier and free until 6/30. You’ll see it’s just as good as Anthropic”.
- Then it was “Yeah, clients everywhere are saying it’s non-functional/producing errors we haven’t seen before in this agent. We have no idea what’s going on. Can you try unplugging it and plugging it back in?”