Prompt Engineering for Microsoft 365 Copilot

Learn to write Copilot prompts that work, use it across Outlook, Word, Excel and Teams, and build your own agents.
What you'll learn

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Write Copilot prompts using goal, instruction, context and output spec
Apply advanced prompt and context engineering techniques
Ground answers in your own documents
Use Copilot inside Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Teams
Build and share custom Copilot agents
Spot hallucinations, bias and confidently wrong answers
Save, reuse and schedule your best prompts
Avoid the prompting myths that waste your time
Requirements

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Access to Microsoft Copilot. The free Copilot Chat included with Microsoft 365 is enough for most of the course.
Some lectures use the paid Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on: Copilot inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Teams, uploading files into an agent, and scheduled prompts. Every lecture is labelled, so you always know before you start.
Files stored in OneDrive or SharePoint if you want to follow along with the lectures on working from your own documents.
No prior experience with prompt engineering, AI tools or Copilot is required.
Everyday familiarity with Outlook, Word and Excel is helpful but not required.
Description

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This course contains promotional material.
Most people use Microsoft Copilot the same way. They type one line, read the answer, think "that's alright, I suppose", and close the window.
The tool is not the problem. The instructions are.
This is not a tour of every button in Copilot. There are plenty of those already. This course is about the part almost nobody teaches: how to ask. It is a skill, it is learnable in an afternoon, and the difference between a one-line request and a properly briefed one is not subtle. You will see it side by side, on real work, in the first twenty minutes.
What you will be able to do
You will brief Copilot the way you would brief a capable colleague who knows nothing about your situation, because that is exactly what it is. You will know the four things every working prompt contains, which of them people always forget, and what happens when you leave one out.
You will also stop treating a whole task as one message. Real work is a sequence of small steps you check as you go. Get the right material in. Ask for options. Decide what "good" means before you compare anything. Ask for the plan before the work. Then make Copilot argue with its own output. You will watch that sequence run end to end in the second lecture, before we take it apart.
What is inside
Getting oriented. Which Copilot is which, what each one can actually see, and the four controls in the chat box worth knowing. Then a full worked example: a fourteen message email thread turned into a comparison table, two charts and a finished deck, in eight prompts, none of them clever.
Prompt engineering basics. The four building blocks of a prompt. Weak prompt versus engineered prompt, side by side, on two very different tasks. Constraints Copilot can actually follow, and why "don't hallucinate" does nothing at all. How to fix an answer in five words instead of rewriting your prompt. And a blunt look at the popular advice that has no effect: expert roles, "think step by step", politeness, tips, and the named frameworks.
Advanced prompt and context engineering. Ten short techniques, each one about controlling what Copilot can see before it answers. Grounding answers in real documents. Phrasing questions so that "it is not in the source" stays an available answer. Letting the model interview you, because you cannot supply context you do not know is missing. Forcing genuinely different options instead of one option at three volumes. Breaking a big task into steps small enough to check. Teaching style with examples when rules are not enough. Getting a review with criteria instead of opinions. And setting standing rules so you stop repeating yourself in every chat.
The Office apps. Replying to email from one line of intent, and asking your whole inbox questions in plain language. Summarising, extracting from and comparing documents in Word. Real Excel formulas that recalculate rather than arithmetic guessed in a chat window, data cleanup, and running a prompt down an entire column. A report turned into a starter deck. Meeting and channel recaps in Teams that surface what is still unresolved.
Copilot agents. An agent is a prompt with a saved job. You will build two from scratch, in about two minutes each: a translation agent that holds a register and returns nothing but the translation, and a format agent that refuses to write the post when required information is missing. That refusal is the valuable part, and almost nobody builds it in on purpose.
Limitations and safe use. Hallucinations, and why they are more dangerous now that they are rarer. Sycophancy: watch Copilot enthusiastically agree with two opposite plans in a row, then learn the phrasing that gets past it. Knowledge cutoffs, and what a citation does and does not prove. A verification workflow that matches effort to what is actually at stake, rather than the "always check everything" advice nobody follows. What is safe to put into Copilot at work, and who owns what comes out.
About Copilot plans
Most of this course works on the Copilot Chat that comes with Microsoft 365. Everything about how to write a prompt works on the basic plan, because those techniques are about how you brief a model, not about which features you own.
The paid Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on buys specific things: Copilot inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Teams, answers grounded in your own emails and files, uploading documents into an agent, and prompts that run on a schedule. Every lecture is labelled Basic or Premium, so you always know before you start whether you can follow along.
Who this is for
People who already have Copilot at work and are quietly disappointed by it. If you have typed a request, received something grammatically perfect and completely empty, and concluded the tool was overhyped, this course is the missing piece.
It is not for developers looking for Copilot Studio, Power Automate or GitHub Copilot. Those are different products with different skill sets. This is Microsoft 365 Copilot for everyday work: email, documents, spreadsheets, meetings and decisions.
One thing before you enrol
There is no secret prompt in here, and no template that unlocks a hidden expert mode, because there isn't one. What you get instead is the unglamorous set of habits that actually works. Say what you are trying to achieve. Hand over the material only you have. Say how you want the answer back. And never send the first thing that comes out.
That last habit is worth more than every technique in this course put together, and it takes about thirty seconds.
Enrol, open Copilot in a second window, and bring one real task you have been putting off.
This course is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Microsoft Corporation. All product names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Who this course is for

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Office and knowledge workers whose organisation has rolled out Microsoft Copilot and who are not getting much out of it.
Managers and team leads who want a repeatable way to brief Copilot and to standardise how their team uses it.
Analysts, project managers and operations staff who spend their day in Outlook, Word, Excel and Teams.
IT, HR and enablement staff responsible for training colleagues on Copilot.
Not for developers looking for Copilot Studio, Power Automate or GitHub Copilot.
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