8 cool things Copilot can do in Word

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AI-generated text? Yawn. Learn how Copilot can be truly useful in Word.
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We all know by now that Copilot can help you write and rewrite text in Word, often with mediocre results. But there’s more to Microsoft’s generative AI tool than just slopping out words.

In fact, Copilot’s most useful features in Word have more to do with editing, formatting, and research assistance than with writing per se. In this guide you’ll learn several ways Copilot can save you time and improve your documents.

Who can use Copilot in Word

Individuals with a Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, or Premium subscription have access to Copilot from inside Word and other M365 apps. For business users, it’s a bit more complicated and depends on your M365 subscription, your company size, and whether you have an add-on M365 Copilot subscription. See our M365 Copilot explainer for details.

Working with Copilot in Word

First, let’s quickly go over the notable settings of the Copilot sidebar.

When you have a document open in Word, click the Copilot icon; it may be floating at the lower-right corner of your Word window or parked at the right end of the Ribbon toolbar. The Copilot side pane will open along the right of the page. You’ll type your prompts to Copilot inside the chat window in this pane.

Click the Copilot icon to open the Copilot sidebar.
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Agent mode: By default, Copilot can directly apply changes to the document that’s open in the main window. This is known as “agent mode” and is indicated by the words Allow editing above the chat window. If you click Allow editing and change it to Chat only, Copilot won’t be able to make changes to the document; all its responses will appear in the sidebar only.

The tips in this guide require Copilot to be in agent mode, so make sure that this remains set at Allow editing.

Choice of AI model: Behind the scenes, Copilot has access to various genAI models, including different versions of Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT. By default, Copilot decides which model to use based on your prompt. To tell it to use a particular model, click Auto at the upper right of the Copilot pane and select a model from the dropdown that opens.

The Auto setting should be fine for tips in this guide, but feel free to experiment with specific models to see which give you the best results for your tasks.

Important: Remember that generative AI output often includes errors, so always check Copilot’s results for accuracy. (Also see our tips for reducing hallucinations in Copilot.) And it’s always a good practice to rewrite the output in your own voice as you’re reviewing it.

8 ways to put Copilot to work in Word

Summarize in specific ways

Turn a text block into a list or table

Import content from other documents, including spreadsheets

Reorder sections of your document

Find or create images or illustrations

Suggest ways to improve your document

Suggest references and citations

Find and highlight specific information in the doc

1. Summarize in specific ways

It’s easy to get a quick rundown on a long document by simply prompting “summarize” to Copilot. But try adding specific wording to tailor its output to your needs. Copilot can filter out the fluff and focus on the document’s content that you really need to know.

Give Copilot more specific instructions to get better document summaries.
Howard Wen / Foundry

For instance:

Summarize this document into key bullet points.

List all the action items in this document.

If you need a specific tone:

Turn this document into a one-paragraph executive summary with a professional tone.

You can always enter a follow-up prompt to Copilot if you need to extract even more specific information out of the document:

Please add more detail about the budget section.

2. Turn a text block into a list or table

Instead of manually cutting up sentences into bullet points or wrangling with Word’s built-in table formatting tool, let Copilot do these tasks for you.

Use Copilot to convert text into a table in seconds.
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Select the paragraph or section that you want to transform. Next, you can either click the Copilot icon next to the selected text and type your prompt into the toolbar that appears, or just type the prompt into the Copilot side pane.

If you want to transform the text into a list, prompt something like this:

Turn the highlighted section into a bulleted list.

Organize this selected text into a numbered list.

To organize paragraph text or a list into a table:

Convert this paragraph into a three-column table with headers for Feature, Benefit and Cost.

Extract all deadlines into a table.

Copilot will analyze the text, extract the relevant information, and generate a preview of your requested list or table. If you like it, click Keep it to insert it into your document. If not, you can prompt Copilot with a follow-up, such as: “Make the bullet points shorter.”

3. Import content from other documents, including spreadsheets

While working on a document, you may want to insert a few sections from another document or data from a spreadsheet. No need to open that other document and copy-and-paste. Copilot can import that content for you and seamlessly fit it into the current document.

Copilot has summarized, formatted, and inserted information from another document.
Howard Wen / Foundry

Put your cursor in your document where you want the imported content to go. Inside the Copilot pane chat box, type / (a forward slash). This opens a dropdown list of your recent files in your OneDrive or SharePoint. Select the document. (If it doesn’t appear in this list, type the first few letters of the document’s filename to pull it up.)

With the document selected that you want to import content from, enter your prompt to Copilot, such as:

Incorporate the safety guidelines from /Onboarding_Manual.docx into this section, but make the tone a bit more casual.

Create a summary table of the Q3 budget using /Annual_Budget_2026.xlsx.

Copilot will analyze the referenced document, extract the relevant content, and insert it into the document that you’re working on where you set the cursor. It’ll also format this imported content to match the formatting of the rest of the document.

In the example above requesting a summary table, Copilot will extract the relevant numbers, format them into a table, and insert the table in your document.

4. Reorder sections of your document

As you’re reviewing your document, you might see that its conclusion could work better as the intro or the middle sections should be reordered to improve the reading flow. You don’t need to cut-and-paste these text blocks yourself. Try instructing Copilot to rearrange them for you.

You can ask Copilot for help reorganizing your document.
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If you know how you want your document to be reordered, write your prompt in a way that clearly describes the sections and where they need to go:

Move the section titled Timeline so it comes after the Executive Summary.

Or, if you aren’t sure of the best order for the sections of your document, try prompting Copilot to offer a suggestion:

Review this document and reorder its main sections into a more logical sequence that improves the overall readability.

Copilot will analyze the document, then rearrange its text blocks, and present a preview of its suggested structure. You can approve it to replace the current version of your document.

5. Find or create images or illustrations

Like most genAI models, Copilot can generate images from scratch based on a description of what you envision. Alternatively, you can prompt it to find a licensed stock image. Furthermore, you can ask it to generate or find an image based on your overall document or a section in it.

Copilot can generate new images or help you find stock photos or illustrations.
Howard Wen / Foundry

Examples to try:

Create a photorealistic image of a businessperson in a meeting presenting information on a whiteboard to go with the Budget section of the document.

Suggest a stock photo of a laptop with bar graphics or charts on its screen.

Suggest a banner image to go under the Timeline section.

Copilot will generate an image in its sidebar. To insert it into your document, set the cursor in the document where you want the image to go. Then move the pointer over the preview of the image that you want and click the + sign that appears over it.

Once the image is in your document, you can right-click it to change its text wrapping: Top and Bottom sets the document text above and below the graphic, and Square flows the text around the sides of the graphic.

6. Suggest ways to improve your document

When you’ve been building and revising a document for hours, you might lose the ability to judge your own writing, such as spotting clunky phrasing or structural issues. Let Copilot give you an objective review of your draft. You can tell it to scan the whole document, or a specific section, and give you feedback. Give it a specific goal in your prompt.

Examples:

Review this document and suggest ways to make the tone sound more authoritative and direct.

Scan this text and highlight any sections where the explanations are difficult to follow or too wordy.

Copilot can offer suggestions for improving the wording of your document.
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Copilot will analyze your draft and generate a list of suggestions. It won’t just describe what’s wrong with your draft but usually will offer examples of how to rewrite it. You can even let Copilot insert its suggested rewrites into your document.

7. Suggest references and citations

You can prompt Copilot to act like a research assistant and hunt down supporting facts for your document or format your sources into citations.

Highlight a specific portion of text that you’ve written that needs factual backing, or have Copilot examine your entire document (without highlighting anything in it). Then you can prompt Copilot to track down context from your company’s internal documents or the internet. Examples:

Suggest three reputable web sources that validate the information in this highlighted section.

Find the original policy document in our files that outlines these safety compliance standards and reference it here.

Copilot can find relevant sources for citation.
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(If you’re using the Draft with Copilot feature, covered in our guide to writing and rewriting with Copilot, Copilot will usually include numbered citations at the end of the text it generates with clickable links to their source.)

When it comes to formatting those sources into a bibliography or “works cited” page, let Copilot handle this tedious job. Just highlight your list of links and notes and prompt Copilot:

Convert these sources into APA style citations and organize them alphabetically.

Let Copilot handle citation formatting.
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Of course, you should always check any citations and web links generated by Copilot to confirm that they are accurate and relevant to your document.

8. Find and highlight specific information in the doc

When you’re dealing with a massive document, using standard search to find something in it can be like trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack. Instead of scrolling-and-scanning through the document or guessing at exact phrases to search for, prompt Copilot to help you find that needle.

You can ask Copilot complex questions about where specific concepts are buried in the document. Examples:

Find where the budget is mentioned in the document.

Locate all sections that mention compliance risks and list the page numbers.

Copilot will scan the document to extract the content that you need. Then it’ll provide you with references or summaries and sometimes links that you can click to jump straight to the spots in the document where they are mentioned.

You can also ask Copilot to highlight or flag subject matter:

Identify every paragraph discussing the budget and highlight them.

Copilot can quickly find and highlight information in your document.
Howard Wen / Foundry

About Author

AndyC

Andy Curtis is an award-winning security consultant, researcher and public speaker. He has been working in the computer security industry since the early 1990s, having been employed by state and federal government, leading healthcare and banking providers across three continents. He has given talks about computer security for some of the world’s largest companies, worked with law enforcement agencies on investigations into hacking groups, and is a regular voice on TV and radio explaining IT security threats.

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