Microsoft Copilot lives inside Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams and PowerPoint, and GitHub Copilot lives inside your editor. That changes how you prompt it. A Copilot prompt that works does not describe the task from scratch; it points at something that already exists, the document open in Word, a range in Excel, a thread in Outlook, the function under your cursor, and says what to do with it. The prompts below follow that rule. Where a prompt refers to a file, replace it with the file's name or use the slash reference that Copilot offers when you type it.
Copilot prompts for Word
- Summarise this document in five bullet points for someone who has not read it, then list the decisions it asks the reader to make.
- Rewrite the section under the heading [heading] to be half the length, keeping every number and name.
- Draft a one-page proposal from the notes in this document: problem, approach, timeline, cost, next step. Use plain language and no adjectives.
- Find every place this document makes a claim without a source and list them with the sentence.
- Turn this document into a two-paragraph email that asks the reader for [decision] by [date].
- Check this document for consistency: terms used two ways, tense changes, headings that do not match the text under them.
Copilot prompts for Excel
Copilot in Excel works on a table, so format the range as a table first and select it. Then:
- Add a column that classifies each row as High, Medium or Low based on [column] with thresholds [values].
- Show me the three biggest changes in [column] between [period] and [period], with the rows.
- Create a pivot table of [measure] by [category] and [month], sorted by total descending.
- Highlight rows where [column A] is greater than [column B] and explain the rule you used.
- Write a formula for a new column that calculates [plain description], and explain each part of it.
- What is unusual in this data? List up to five findings with the cells that support each.
Copilot prompts for Outlook
- Summarise this thread: what was decided, what is still open, and who owes a reply.
- Draft a reply that agrees to [request], asks for [information], and proposes [time]. Three short paragraphs, friendly, no exclamation marks.
- Draft a polite decline to this invitation that offers [alternative].
- Find the emails from the last two weeks where I was asked a question and have not replied, and list them with the question.
- Rewrite my draft to be shorter and clearer, keeping the ask in the first sentence.
Copilot prompts for Teams
- Recap this meeting: decisions, actions with owners, open questions. Quote the transcript for each decision.
- What did [person] commit to in this meeting?
- Summarise this channel for the last week in five points, and list anything that needs my reply.
- Draft a message to the channel announcing [change], with what changes, when, and what people need to do.
- Where did the discussion disagree, and what was the resolution, if any?
Copilot prompts for PowerPoint
- Create a presentation from this document with one idea per slide, a title that states the idea, and no more than four bullets per slide.
- Add a slide after slide [n] that summarises the risks in the document as a table.
- Rewrite the titles of every slide so each one states the takeaway rather than the topic.
- Create speaker notes for each slide: two sentences on what to say, one on the transition to the next slide.
GitHub Copilot prompts
GitHub Copilot reads the open file and the files you reference. In chat, name the file or select the code first; in the editor, a comment above the cursor is the prompt.
- Explain what this function does, its inputs and outputs, and any edge case it does not handle.
- Write unit tests for this function covering the normal case, empty input, very large input and invalid input. Use the project's existing test framework.
- Refactor this function to remove the nested conditionals without changing its behaviour. Show the diff and explain each change.
- This test fails with [error]. Propose the three most likely causes in order and the one thing to check for each.
- Add input validation to this endpoint and return the project's standard error shape on failure.
- Write a docstring for this function in the style used elsewhere in this file.
- Generate a migration that adds [column] to [table] with a safe default, plus the rollback.
- Review this file for security issues: injection, unvalidated input, secrets in code, unsafe deserialisation. Report only what you can point to.
The habits that make Copilot prompts work
Point at the thing. "Summarise this document" works because the document is open; "summarise my notes" does not, because Copilot does not know which notes. In Excel, select the table; in Outlook, open the thread; in GitHub Copilot, select the code or name the file.
Say the format. Copilot defaults to prose. Ask for bullets, a table, a column or a slide and it builds that. Say the length too; "five points" produces five points, "brief" produces a guess.
Give it the rule when the task has one. Thresholds, the sort order, the tone of an email, the test framework. Copilot works inside your files but does not know your rules until you state them.
Check the output against the source. Copilot summaries are reliable on structure and occasionally wrong on a number or a name, and a summary of a long thread can miss a late reply. For anything that goes to someone else, read the source once.
These prompts are written for Copilot's context, and many have a model-neutral version in the prompt library: the operations prompts for meeting summaries, the productivity prompts for email and the data analysis prompts for spreadsheets do the same jobs in ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini when you are outside Microsoft 365. For the coding side, the coding prompts cover what GitHub Copilot's chat can take as a longer brief.
