Most businesses that are paying for Microsoft Copilot are using a small fraction of what it can do. Reid Johnston, Teal cofounder and Chief Intelligent Transformation Officer, has been sharing practical Copilot tips in monthly virtual events since late 2024. Here’s what he found actually moves the needle for small and midmarket businesses – organized by tool – so you can easily find the features you’re missing.
Key Takeaways
- Copilot in Excel can write formulas, reconcile datasets, and build dashboards from raw data. No formula expertise required.
- The Researcher Agent produces structured, cited research reports from dozens of web sources in minutes, and analyzes your own meetings the same way.
- The Copilot sidebar in Microsoft Edge is free for anyone with a Microsoft 365 account and works on any web page you’re already reading.
- The Teams Meet section gives you podcast-style audio recaps and short video highlights of meetings you missed, across up to 30 days of recordings.
Table of Contents
Copilot in Excel
1. Build Excel formulas with a plain-English request.
Jill Williams, Teal VP of Finance and Accounting, uses this feature every week for trial balances and quarterly reporting. Before Copilot, she manually clicked through each row to build formulas she didn’t know by memory – functions like XMATCH and XLOOKUP.
Now she simply types what she wants the formula to do, and Copilot returns the right expression with an explanation and alternatives.
How to do it:
- Open your spreadsheet in Excel and click the Copilot icon in the ribbon to open the side panel.
- Type what you want the formula to do in plain English, for example: “Match the account name in column A to the account name on Sheet 2 and pull over the balance.”
- Copilot returns a formula with an explanation. It also suggests alternatives if the first option doesn’t fit your structure.
- Copy the formula into your cell. If it errors, check for an accidental line break in the formula. Copilot occasionally splits syntax across lines.
2. Reconcile two datasets without reviewing every row.
If you need to find differences between two sets of data (e.g., two weeks of payroll records, two versions of a client list, two reporting periods), Copilot can surface the mismatches in seconds instead of requiring a time-consuming review.
How to do it:
- Place both datasets in your spreadsheet. Named tables work best because Copilot can reference them by name in your prompt.
- Open the Copilot side panel and type: “Reconcile [Table 1] and [Table 2] and show me any rows that do not match.”
- Copilot will return a list of any mismatches. It may place results on a new sheet. So, if you want them on the current sheet, add that instruction to your prompt.
Pro tip: Be specific about which columns should match. The more context in your prompt, the more accurate the reconciliation.
3. Use =COPILOT() directly in cells to enrich data at scale.
Instead of using the side panel, you can type =COPILOT() directly in a cell and use it like any other Excel formula. This puts AI output exactly where you want it in the spreadsheet – faster than copying results out of the side panel and into cells manually.
How to do it:
- Click an empty cell.
- Type =COPILOT(“your prompt here”, A1) – where A1 is the cell containing the data you want Copilot to reason over.
- Copilot fills the cell with its answer.
- You can then drag the formula down the column to apply it to every row automatically.
4. Use Agent Mode to make changes to your workbook and build dashboards.
The Copilot side panel summarizes and analyzes data and gives you things to copy. Agent Mode goes further. It edits your spreadsheet directly. That means reformatting, conditional highlighting, restructuring columns, and building a full dashboard from raw data.
How to do it:
- Open the Copilot side panel in Excel.
- Click the Agent Mode toggle in the prompt area.
- Type your instruction. Simple example: “Highlight every number greater than $10,000 in yellow.” Advanced example: “Create a dashboard from this data showing annual revenue by business unit, profit by year, and total KPIs.”
- Copilot works through the request step by step. For a full dashboard, expect 3–5 minutes. Review the output and undo if anything needs adjustment.
Copilot Chat and the Researcher Agent
5. Switch to Think Deeper for better answers.
When you open Copilot, the default mode is Auto – it picks a response style on its own. For most business questions, switching to Model Council or Claude gets you a noticeably more thorough, better-structured answer. It takes slightly longer, but the difference is meaningful for anything beyond a simple lookup.
How to do it:
- Open Copilot in your browser, the Microsoft 365 Copilot desktop app, or with the Windows + C keyboard shortcut.
- In the upper-right corner of the prompt box, click the mode dropdown (it defaults to “Auto”).
- Select “Model Council” or “Claude.”
- Type your prompt. The response takes a bit longer and comes back with clearer structure and more depth.
6. How does the Copilot Researcher Agent differ from regular chat?
Copilot Chat returns a single text answer based on one or two sources. The Researcher Agent crawls dozens of websites, reasons over everything it finds, and returns a formatted, cited report – in roughly 5–10 minutes.
If you normally spend 30 minutes gathering notes from multiple Google searches, Researcher does that while you do something else.
How to use it:
- Open Copilot and select “Researcher” from the agent menu.
- Type your question. Example: “Compare the cybersecurity frameworks small businesses use most often, and note which are most commonly required by cyber liability insurers.“
- Researcher may ask follow-up questions to narrow the scope. Answer them, or type “Use your best judgment and proceed” to let it run.
- Copilot returns a structured report with section headers, a comparison table, and cited sources you can verify data from.
7. Use Researcher to coach yourself from a meeting recording.
You can point the Researcher Agent at a Teams meeting recording and ask it to evaluate how you communicated. Not summarize the meeting, but give you specific feedback with examples and suggestions you can act on before the next one.
How to do it:
- Open Copilot and select Researcher.
- Attach the specific meeting recording or transcript or tell it which meeting it should analyze.
- Use a prompt like: “You are an experienced executive coach. Using only this transcript, evaluate how I communicated. Flag specific phrases where I hedged, over-explained, or lost clarity. Respond with clear headings so I can act on the feedback.”
- Researcher will take 15–20 minutes to work through the transcript and return a structured coaching report.
Important: Microsoft’s Responsible AI policies prevent Copilot from evaluating other people’s performance. If you try to run this prompt using someone else’s name or framing it as a performance review, Copilot will decline. Use it on yourself.
8. Connect your CRM to Copilot and query your pipeline without switching tabs.
Copilot connects to third-party applications – including HubSpot and Salesforce – so you can ask questions about your own business data without ever having to leave the tool.
Gar Whaley, Teal cofounder and Chief Revenue Officer, demonstrated this live by asking Copilot how many deals were open in Teal’s HubSpot pipeline and getting a real-time answer directly in the chat.
How to connect an external app:
- Open Copilot and select Researcher.
- Click Sources.
- Scroll to find available third-party connectors. Microsoft pre-loads options like HubSpot, Salesforce, and Google Calendar based on what’s available to your tenant.
- Click Connect next to the app you want, then authenticate with your account credentials.
- Once connected, query your data: “How many open deals do we have in HubSpot right now, and what stage are they at?”
You must be in Researcher mode to use third-party connections. Regular Copilot Chat will give you directions to open HubSpot manually rather than querying it directly.
Pro tip: Check out Microsoft’s list of connectors in their connector gallery. Microsoft 365 Copilot connectors
Copilot in Microsoft Edge
9. Analyze any web page from the browser sidebar (no paid license required).
The Copilot sidebar in Microsoft Edge works on any page you’re reading. It’s available to anyone with a Microsoft 365 account, with or without the paid Copilot license. The free version reads web content only; the paid version also accesses your work files from within the sidebar.
How to turn it on:
- Open Microsoft Edge and click the three dots (…) in the upper-right corner.
- Go to Settings → Appearance → Copilot and AI.
- Toggle it on. If you don’t see the option, your IT admin may have it disabled organization-wide.
- Navigate to any web page, then click the Copilot icon that appears in the sidebar.
- Ask anything about what’s on the page: “Summarize this article in three sentences,” “Create a comparison table from these plans,” or “Explain this contract clause in plain English.”
Where this is especially useful: Comparing vendor pricing pages, understanding long contracts or technical reports, decoding medical or legal documents, and getting a quick summary before committing to a long article.
Microsoft Teams
10. Get a podcast-style audio recap of meetings you missed.
Teams can generate an audio recap of one or more recorded meetings. This is especially useful when you were out of the office, joined late, or just need a catch-up without watching a full recording. You can select multiple meetings and get a single recap covering up to 30 days at once.
How to find it:
- In Teams, click the three dots on the left navigation bar.
- Search for “Meet” and pin it to your sidebar so it stays visible.
- In the Meet section, click “Audio Recaps.”
- Select the meetings you want included and choose a format. Newscast style is a good default.
- Click Generate. Teams will create a podcast-style audio summary covering the major topics across all of the meetings you selected.
11. Watch a 2-minute highlight reel instead of rewatching the full recording.
For any individual recorded Teams meeting, Play Highlights generates a short video with audio narration – covering only the key moments. A 60-minute meeting becomes a 2–3 minute clip with the video snips and narrated summary of what was discussed.
How to access it:
- Open the Teams meeting recording in the Meet section or via your calendar.
- Click “Watch in Browser.”
- Click “Play Highlights.” Teams generates the clip automatically — no extra setup needed.
- Share the browser link with anyone who missed the meeting instead of sending a full recording link.
Teal uses this for leadership team meetings when someone has to miss. Instead of watching an hour-plus EOS meeting in full, the person gets a 2-minute video covering what was discussed and what was decided.
Get Ahead by Adopting Copilot in Your SMB
Microsoft Copilot has moved fast over the past six months. The tips above are the ones our team uses every day, and the ones we share with our clients.
If your team already has a Copilot license and is only using it for meeting summaries, you have a lot more available to you right now. For help building a Copilot adoption plan or figuring out which features fit your team’s day-to-day workflows, Teal’s AI consulting services are available to you.
