Microsoft Copilot
Most public health professionals working in institutional settings already have access to Microsoft Copilot through their organisation's Microsoft 365 subscription — often without realising it. It lives inside the tools you already use every day: Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams. This page explains what it can do and how to get the most out of it.
There are two distinct Microsoft Copilot products, and it is worth knowing which one you have.
Available at copilot.microsoft.com — no subscription required, just a Microsoft account. This is a capable general-purpose AI assistant, comparable to ChatGPT or Gemini. Useful for drafting, research, and analysis. Your conversations are not used to train Microsoft's models, but they are not covered by enterprise data protection.
The paid add-on (~$30/user/month) that integrates AI directly into Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, and PowerPoint. Available when your organisation has a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan and the Copilot add-on. This version keeps your data inside your organisation's Microsoft 365 tenant — it does not leave your IT environment and is not used to train any AI models. For most institutional users, this is the version to use for work content.
Draft documents from a prompt, rewrite sections for a different audience, summarise long reports, and extract key points. Particularly useful for producing first drafts of policy briefs, meeting reports, and situation reports when you already have the source material.
In practice: open Word, click the Copilot icon, and write your request — "Draft an executive summary of this report for a non-specialist audience, 200 words" — and Copilot produces a draft within the document that you can edit directly.
Ask questions about your data in plain language — "Which countries had the highest under-5 mortality rate in 2023?" — and Copilot queries your spreadsheet and answers. It can generate charts, apply formulas, and highlight patterns. No formula knowledge required.
Useful for quickly interrogating surveillance data, budget tables, or monitoring and evaluation datasets without writing a single formula.
Draft email replies, summarise long threads, and prepare for meetings. The "Coaching" feature reviews your draft email and suggests improvements to tone, clarity, and structure. Thread summaries are particularly useful when returning from leave or catching up on a long conversation.
Transcribes and summarises meetings in real time. After a meeting, Copilot produces a summary, lists action points, and can answer questions about what was discussed ("What did John say about the vaccine rollout timeline?"). Saves the time otherwise spent on manual meeting notes — and catches things that manual note-taking misses.
Requires that your meeting is transcribed (recording must be enabled and participants informed, in line with your organisation's data policy).
Copilot Notebooks (accessible via copilot.microsoft.com and within Teams) is one of the most useful features for research-heavy public health work. It is less well known than the in-app features, but worth understanding.
A Notebook is a persistent workspace where you can bring together multiple sources — documents, web pages, data files — and ask Copilot questions that draw on all of them at once. Unlike a regular chat, a Notebook stays open across sessions. You can keep building on it, adding new sources, and returning to previous questions.
A Notebook is well suited to any task where you are synthesising information from multiple sources over time:
Add WHO guidance documents, journal articles, and national policy papers. Ask Copilot to compare recommendations across sources, identify gaps, or produce a structured summary. Add new papers as you find them — the Notebook grows with your review.
Add a log of meeting notes, progress reports, and field visit reports. Ask Copilot to identify themes, summarise progress, or draft sections of a donor report. Particularly useful when you are the repository of institutional memory for a programme.
Before a country visit, conference, or stakeholder meeting, build a Notebook with background documents — country health profiles, previous assessment reports, agenda papers. Ask Copilot to brief you on key issues or prepare questions. The context is all in one place.
Microsoft 365 Copilot does not have a "Custom Instructions" field in the same way that Claude or ChatGPT do. The most practical workaround is to include your preferences in each prompt:
You can keep a short "style reminder" in a Sticky Note or a text file and paste it into prompts where tone matters. It takes three seconds and makes a significant difference to output quality.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is an excellent in-workflow tool, but it is not a substitute for a dedicated AI assistant. A few limitations to be aware of:
It does not have a persistent memory system across all contexts — each app works somewhat independently. It cannot access files on your computer outside the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. It does not support skills or custom automation in the way that Claude Cowork does. And it is generally less capable for long-form analytical writing or complex reasoning tasks.
Think of it as your in-document assistant — the tool you use inside the documents you are already working on. For more open-ended analytical and writing tasks, a dedicated platform like Claude Cowork will usually get you better results.