What’s new in Microsoft 365 Copilot | Jan 2025
February 01, 2025 · By Seth_Patton
A transformed experience with Copilot in the Microsoft 365 admin center
Welcome to the January 2025 edition of What's new in Microsoft 365 Copilot! Every month, we highlight new features and enhancements to keep Microsoft 365 admins up to date with Copilot features that help your users be more productive and efficient in the apps they use every day.
Copilot in the Microsoft 365 admin center transforms the IT admin experience by leveraging AI to optimize routine tasks, generate insights that enable better decision-making, and simplify finding the configurations you need. Organizations that have purchased any number of Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses for their tenant can take advantage of Copilot in the Microsoft 365 admin center with capabilities such as:
Recap -
Receive a personalized summary of trends and insights across key administrative areas based on your role.
Admins can receive a personalized summary of trends and insights across key administrative areas based on your role in the Microsoft 365 admin center
Admins can easily retrieve a summary of message center posts across apps and services using Copilot in the Microsoft 365 admin center
Message Center summarization -
Easily retrieve a summary of message center posts across apps and services, based on your tenant configuration.
Copilot in the Microsoft 365 admin center started rolling out in January.
Understand usage trends with Copilot Analytics
With Copilot Usage Intensity and Retention reports, IT admins can gain deeper insight into the intensity and frequency of usage. This helps admins go beyond the raw number of users deploying Copilot once a month and explore the frequency and intensity of Copilot usage at various thresholds. They can also compare top groups to see how usage intensity differs, get a sense for how consistent and repeated usage of Copilot is trending over time, and compare retention across groups. These features rolled out in January.
A blue bar chart on a white background provides stats on usage and frequency for different user groups, pictured in the bottom right.
Scale Microsoft Copilot academy in Viva Learning
Admins can now duplicate the Copilot Academy and customize the duplicated academy to their preferences and organizational priorities. The learning paths and feature sets in the duplicated academy will continue to receive updates from the AI & Copilot resources provider that powers content for the Copilot Academy. Admins will have the option to duplicate these sets if they prefer to change the courses within them or update them manually. This feature is available in 8 languages and requires a premium Viva Learning or Viva Suite license. This feature is rolling out in January.
Admins can duplicate the Copilot Academy from the Admin tab in Viva Learning under the manage academies section.
Register for the Microsoft 365 Community Conference
Reimagine what's possible for your career, your team, your business - and for work itself. At the Microsoft 365 Community Conference, connect with hundreds of Microsoft executives, subject matter experts, and product makers to unlock solutions that will accelerate your AI transformation. No matter your role, the Microsoft 365 Community Conference is your opportunity to learn more about real-life use cases for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft 365 Copilot, get expert guidance, build tangible skills, and return to your job ready to add value immediately—for your organization, your customers, and your career. Learn more and register to attend the event May 6-8 in Las Vegas here.
An image saying Microsoft 365 Community Conference May 6 to 8 in Las Vegas with a tagline that says Your front-row seat to the future of work.
Copilot Prompt Gallery app helps users discover, save, and share their favorite prompts
The new Copilot Prompt Gallery app provides a central place for users to find and use relevant prompts across Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Chat, and agents, complementing the existing in-app experiences. Users can also save and revisit their favorite prompts, share them with colleagues, and discover prompts for specific tasks or workflows shared within a Microsoft Teams team.
The capabilities in the Copilot Prompt Gallery app empower users to gain prompt inspiration and unlock greater value while accelerating their organization’s AI onboarding and adoption efforts. This Meta OS app is rolling out in February and will be available for all Microsoft 365 Copilot users to add in www.microsoft365.com, Teams desktop, and Outlook. Copilot Chat users without a Microsoft 365 Copilot license will gain access to the app this spring.
New Copilot Prompt Gallery app displays relevant “Team prompts” specific to Microsoft Teams team the user is a member of.
New entry point for Copilot in Excel
The Copilot icon now appears in an Excel spreadsheet as a convenient entry point for users to access Copilot capabilities in the flow of their work. They can discover formula suggestions, conditional formatting ideas, and explore new ways to visualize data using charts and PivotTables. This feature can be hidden from the grid when users are sharing their screens. This feature is rolling out in February.
The Copilot icon has been selected, showing a menu of Copilot prompts
Refine and enhance email with Copilot in Outlook
We’re making it even easier to draft emails with Copilot in Outlook by introducing new ways to refine and enhance writing. With our latest updates, users have more flexibility throughout the writing process, including the ability to rewrite selected portions of text for more precise edits. To streamline the experience even further, Auto Rewrite will enable faster, more seamless revisions with just a click. Alongside these improvements, we are launching a redesigned interface that makes Copilot writing assistance even more intuitive and effortless to use. This feature is rolling out in February.
An email draft with a paragraph highlighted and a Copilot prompt window suggesting improvements.
Now Mac users can chat, interact, and ask questions to Copilot using Copilot Chat in Outlook for Mac. Users can access Copilot Chat directly in Outlook as a module. All enterprise and business users with a Microsoft 365 subscription will have access to Copilot Chat with web grounding, and users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license will also have access to work grounding. This feature is rolling out in February.
More capabilities for building and summarizing presentations with Copilot in PowerPoint
Creating a new presentation can be challenging. With a simple prompt and a file, Copilot’s Narrative Builder transforms work into a compelling narrative. This gives users the flexibility to steer the story up front, helping to create a draft that has the right flow and the right information. Users can include one Word document (including encrypted documents), and Copilot will pull in information from the text in the document. This feature rolled out in January.
Narrative Builder grounds on a work file, pulling relevant information for you to steer your story before creating your presentation with Copilot.
Copilot in PowerPoint can now summarize longer presentations that are up to 40,000 words or about 150 slides. This is an increase from the previous limit of about 15,000 words. This feature rolled out in January.
Text selection and file referencing with Copilot in Word
Users can now start a chat with Copilot with selected text in a Word document, and the response from Copilot will be scoped to their selection. This will help users to better refine the response from Copilot and help users stay in the flow of work. This feature began rolling out in January.
A computer screenshot showing a selection of text highlighted with a Copilot window suggesting prompts.
Copilot now includes files based on users’ recent activity when suggesting prompts they can use to draft a new document in word. This enables users to quickly draft a new document in Word without taking the extra time to search through file history. This feature rolled out in January.
Example prompts to try with Copilot, based on your work, are at the top of the blank document to help you get started.
Plain text files in .txt format can now be referenced when users draft a new document with Copilot in Word. This feature started rolling out in January.
A word document with a Copilot prompt open with a .txt document being referenced.
Personalized prompt suggestions from Copilot Chat
Now users can get started in Copilot Chat quickly with personalized prompt suggestions that provide relevant information based on users’ previous conversations. This feature rolled out in December.
A list of prompt suggestions in Copilot Chat with blue arrow hovering over second prompt suggestion from the top
Did you know? The Microsoft 365 Roadmap is where you can get the latest updates on productivity apps and intelligent cloud services. Please note that the dates mentioned in this article are tentative and subject to change. Check back regularly to see what features are in development or coming soon.