Lesson 1 · Beginner · 15 min
Copilot Chat: what is included in your Microsoft 365
What Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat includes without a paid licence: web chat, attached files, images, Pages, agents, and what it cannot see of your organisation.
- Goal
- You will know where to open Copilot Chat, what it can do for you without a paid licence, and what it cannot see of your work.
- Skills
- FrameCheck
Your first attempt, unaided
Open Copilot Chat with your work account and attach nothing. Ask it what your organisation's staff handbook says about time off for moving house. Write down its answer word for word: you will read it again at the end of the lesson.
Copilot Chat is the Copilot included in Microsoft 365 plans, with no additional licence. It answers from the web and from the files you give it, under enterprise data protection shown by a green shield. In Outlook, it also queries your mailbox and your calendar. Elsewhere, it reads neither your OneDrive or SharePoint files, nor your Teams meetings: that requires the paid licence. The rest, you give it.
1What is included, and what needs the paid licence
Copilot Chat opens from the browser at m365copilot.com, from the Microsoft Copilot app on Windows, macOS, iOS and Android, from the Microsoft Edge sidebar and from the Copilot button in Teams. You sign in with your work account. The green shield at the top of the conversation shows that enterprise data protection applies: your prompts, the texts you send, and the answers are not used to train the models and remain subject to your organisation's rules.
What is included at no extra cost, according to Microsoft's documentation:
Capability How to use it What it is for Web-grounded answers On by default; your administrator can turn it off for the whole organisation Check a fact, monitor a topic, get clickable sources Attached files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, text, images) "+" button or drag and drop Summarise, compare, extract, from your own document Image generation "Generate an image of..." Illustrate a presentation or an internal note Copilot Pages "Page" button next to an answer Turn an answer into an editable, shareable document Simple agents "Create an agent" menu An assistant that answers from a document you entrust to it What Copilot Chat does not do without the Microsoft 365 Copilot licence: read your OneDrive or SharePoint files and your Teams meetings, or appear inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint or OneNote. Outlook is the exception. Copilot Chat stays available there and can query your mailbox, your calendar and your meetings through lexical indexing, that is, a keyword search. Full access to your work data does require the licence. The consequence guides the whole course: the quality of what you get depends on what you provide and on a prompt that states clearly what you expect.
Diagram "Included Copilot Chat: what it sees, what it does not"Diagram generated by AI and reviewed 2A meeting note summed up, with and without the file
An assistant wants a summary of a meeting report saved in her OneDrive.
Weak prompt.
Summarise Monday's meeting report.Copilot Chat has no access to that file. Depending on the case, it asks for the document, or it produces a generic summary of an imaginary meeting. Nothing in the answer is usable.
Strong prompt.
Summarise the report below in five bullet points for my manager, who did not attend the meeting. Each bullet starts with a decision or an action, with the owner's name and the deadline when they are given. Report:followed by the pasted text, or the file attached with the "+" button.
What changes. The source is provided, placed last, and the prompt states who the text is for and what a good bullet looks like. The summary comes out usable without rewriting, and you can check it line by line against the document.
3Ask about a document you have not provided
Open Copilot Chat from your browser or from Teams. Check that the green shield is there. Then run this starting prompt, as is, and observe the answer:
"What does our staff handbook say about days off for moving house?"
Copilot Chat does not know your handbook. Note what it does: does it ask for the document, or does it answer with generalities? Then improve the prompt in three moves: attach a fictional document (for instance a two-page sample handbook you write yourself, with no real data), state what you want in one sentence, and ask for the exact quotation of the passage used. Compare the two answers.
Self-assessment grid: (a) the source is attached or pasted; (b) the goal fits in one sentence with an action verb; (c) the answer quotes the passage from the document.
4The purchase procedure Copilot never read
An employee asks: "Summarise the purchasing procedure that sits on the team SharePoint." Copilot Chat does not go and fetch it, since it does not open SharePoint without a licence. It still returns a very presentable purchasing procedure, in four steps, that looks like every purchasing procedure in the world. The employee forwards it to the team. What they should have spotted: the answer covered no document of the organisation, and nothing in its tone said so. Fix: open the file, download it, attach it with the "+" button, then ask for the exact quotation of the passage used. While you are at it, check the sensitivity label of the document, because the lesson on confidential data comes back to it. Rule to remember: if you did not provide the source, the answer has none.
5Quiz
Three questions, instant feedback. Each option comes with an explanation.
6Proof of mastery
Describe in three lines the Copilot Chat screen as you opened it (where, shield shown, buttons available), then paste a prompt that summarises a fictional document you attached, and the answer you obtained.
Criteria
What you wrote at the start of the lesson
Going further
The glossary defines Copilot Chat, enterprise data protection and the prompt. The next lesson, How generative AI answers, shows why an answer without a source can be confidently wrong. Write a good prompt gives the four ingredients, and Before pasting a text sets the rule for what you can hand to the tool. The difference between Copilot Chat and the Microsoft 365 Copilot licence is detailed on the Microsoft Learn overview page cited at the end of this lesson.
Frequently asked questions
Is Copilot Chat free?
It is included in Microsoft 365 business and education plans at no extra cost. Some heavier features, such as file analysis or image generation, are subject to limits that Microsoft states without publishing figures, and to standard access that can be restricted at peak times.
Does Copilot Chat read my email and my OneDrive files?
In Outlook, yes: Copilot Chat can query your mailbox, your calendar and your meetings through lexical indexing. Elsewhere, no. Without the paid Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, it reaches none of your OneDrive or SharePoint files through Microsoft Graph. It then only knows what you paste or attach, and what it finds on the web.
Are my conversations used to train the model?
No. Enterprise data protection, shown by the green shield, guarantees that your prompts and answers are not used to train the models. Your administrator may still review them according to your organisation's logging policy.