This tutorial covers the Microsoft 365 Copilot, accessed through a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. This is distinct from the consumer Copilot, which is a separate product with some overlapping features.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is powered by three key features.
First, Work IQ, which is the intelligence behind Microsoft 365 Copilot. It securely uses your work context, such as files, meetings, messages, and tasks, to deliver relevant help in the moment. So it knows about your specific organization, and your work.
Second, a consistent, easy-to-find entry point that opens Copilot right where you’re working, and changes its behavior depending on what you’re doing at the time.
Third, agentic capabilities. Copilot can work with you to draft, refine, and act directly in the app you’re working in.
I’ll assume you already know how to launch Outlook, read and send mail, move around your folder list and message list with your screen reader, and use the ribbon with the Alt key.
Throughout this tutorial, I’ll be using Narrator. The keystrokes and behaviors I describe mostly also work with JAWS and NVDA, with only minor differences in how the screen reader phrases what it announces.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is continuously improving, and the experience you have today may not exactly match the screens, menu options, or screen reader announcements described in this tutorial. Microsoft regularly updates features in response to customer feedback, including feedback from people who use access technologies.
Although the interface may change, the fundamental skills remain the same: catching up on information quickly, drafting and refining messages, getting feedback on your writing, asking questions about your own mailbox, and turning conversations into action. The goal of this tutorial is to teach those skills and concepts so that you can confidently use Copilot even as the product continues to evolve.
One important scoping note
This module covers Copilot in classic Outlook, the Windows desktop client that has been available for decades and that a great many organizations still run. It does not cover new Outlook. The new Outlook is the subject of a separate module, and the two products differ enough that mixing them up will cost you time. If invoking the File tab in your Outlook opens a dropdown menu, you’re in new Outlook, and you want the other module. If invoking the File tab brings you to a full screen backstage File list, you’re in classic Outlook, and you’re in the right place.
What you need
To use Copilot in classic Outlook, several things need to line up.
First, licensing. Business and education users need a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan plus a Microsoft 365 Copilot license assigned by an administrator. There is also a lower tier called Copilot Chat, sometimes described as the basic tier, which gives you a more limited chat experience.
Second, account type. Copilot in Outlook supports work or school accounts, and Microsoft accounts on outlook.com, hotmail.com, live.com, and msn.com. If you have added a Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud, or generic Imap account to Outlook, that account will not get Copilot features. Outlook will still handle the mail perfectly well, but you won’t be able to use Copilot to assist you with work when using those accounts.
Third, mailbox location. Microsoft supports Copilot in Outlook on mailboxes hosted in Exchange Online. It does not support archive mailboxes, group mailboxes, and shared or delegate mailboxes you have access to.
Fourth, connected experiences. Copilot relies on them. Open File, then Options, then Trust Center, then Trust Center Settings, then Privacy Settings, and confirm that connected experiences are enabled. Organizations that lock these down will find Copilot silently absent.
Fifth, your update channel and build. Copilot features arrive in Current Channel and Monthly Enterprise Channel. To check, press Alt, F, D, and review your Office account information, where you’ll find both your version and your update options.
Where Copilot lives in classic Outlook
Once again, the most important command to remember for Copilot is Alt+C, for Copilot. The functions it offers will vary depending on where you are on classic Outlook when you invoke it. First, let’s see what choices are available to us when we press Alt+C from the Inbox.
Summarize
Let’s start with the feature you’ll use most, and the one that delivers the fastest return.
This feature can help you deal with a common situation. You step away for two hours. You come back to a thread with fourteen replies, several of them from people who reply above the previous message and several from people who reply below it, and at least one of whom has changed the subject line halfway through. Reading all of that in order to work out what was decided is exactly the kind of task screen reader users lose disproportionate time to.
You will find the Summarize option in the Alt+C menu when focus is on a message in your Inbox, and when you have actually opened a message. You’ll get the same quality summary in both places.
Now I press Alt+C, and navigate to Summarize. I press Enter.
PAUSE FOR NARRATOR. Copilot begins generating.
While generation is under way, a Stop generating button is available. Tab to it and press Enter if you asked for the wrong thread, or if the summary is clearly going somewhere unhelpful.
I am taken to a Copilot Chat window, where I can review the summary in the same way I would any document or web page.
The most valuable part of the summary is the citations. Sometimes, relying on the summary won’t be enough. You may want to read the full message a summary refers to, perhaps to further determine the tone of the message and to be certain you understand the point that was being made.
Activate a citation and you land on that message.
If you want to copy the summary to the clipboard, so you can paste it into a Word document or somewhere else for your records, you can select all the content in the read-only edit field with Control+A, then copy the text with Control+C.
Summarize and Reply
This is a combined action that works best when a message in the thread is open. It runs the summarize step and then hands you straight into a drafted reply, so you skip the extra click of opening a fresh draft. The reply generation piece is Microsoft's Draft with Copilot capability, which generates full-length email drafts from prompts based on thread context and organizational information. After the draft appears, you can shape it the same way you would any Copilot draft. You can adjust the tone or length of the response, for example asking Copilot to make the email more formal or casual, or longer or shorter.
List email takeaways
This pulls the notable points out of the message as a scannable list rather than a flowing paragraph. It leans on the same key-point extraction that powers Summarize, but the output is framed as discrete takeaways, typically the decisions, requests, and action items in the message.
Prioritize
Prioritize works at the inbox level rather than on a single open message, though you see its output when a message has focus. It reviews your emails as they arrive in your inbox, assigns a priority of high, low, or normal, and gives a reason why the email might be important to you. When you have a message selected, that reasoning surfaces in the reading pane. In the message list, the first line of content from the email is replaced with a brief summary, and when you select a message, Copilot automatically shows a few lines of explanation about why it believes the message is important to you, which you can expand by clicking the box for more detail. The low-priority icon is off by default but can be turned on in Settings, Copilot, Prioritize.
Any changes you make apply to future email only. Copilot doesn’t go back and re-evaluate mail you've already received. When you turn Prioritize on in one place, such as your mobile device, it works across all clients including desktop. It also skips certain message types, including mail marked low importance by the sender, out-of-office mails, meeting mail like invites and declines, mail you send only to yourself, mail with very little content, non-delivery receipts, quarantine messages, and encrypted messages where the content can't be seen.
Drafting a message with Copilot
Now let’s write something.
I press Ctrl+N to open a new message.
I’ll press Alt+I.
PAUSE FOR NARRATOR. Draft with Copilot dialog.
Focus lands in an edit field. This is where you describe what you want the message to say. Then Tab to the Generate button and press Enter. If you would like some inspiration to get you started, press down-arrow to navigate through some prompt starters.
Let me demonstrate with something realistic. I’ll type:
“Write a message to our state affiliate presidents announcing that online registration for a webinar on Copilot opens on the first of next month. Explain that we are seeking expressions of interest in attending, and we will provide a registration link when registration opens, and that anyone who has an interest in attending should contact me directly stating whether afternoons or evenings work best for them. Keep it warm but efficient, and no longer than four short paragraphs.”
Notice what that prompt does. It states the goal, supplies the context, specifies the facts Copilot cannot invent, and sets an expectation about length and tone. Vague prompts produce vague email. This is the single biggest lever you have over output quality.
I Tab to Generate and press Enter.
PAUSE FOR NARRATOR. Draft generated.
If generation is going wrong, press Shift+Tab and activate the Stop button.
I can press the F6 key until I am in the edit field where I can review what Copilot has proposed.
Once the draft exists, you have a set of controls to work with, and you reach all of them with Tab.
There’s an edit field where you can tell Copilot about anything you’d like to change. Type an instruction there, such as “make it shorter” or “add a sentence thanking last year’s volunteers”, then Tab to the arrow button and press Enter. Copilot revises.
There’s a Regenerate button, which produces a fresh attempt at the same prompt.
There’s a control for adjusting tone and length. Press Enter to expand it, arrow up and down through the options, and press Enter to apply. Depending on your build you’ll see tone options along the lines of formal, neutral, casual, and direct, and length options of short, medium, and long.
When you’re satisfied, Tab to the Keep button and press Enter. The text goes into your message body, where you edit it exactly as you would edit anything you had typed yourself.
If you want none of it, Tab until you hear the Discard button, and press Enter.
Everything I’ve just described works identically when you reply. Open the message, press Ctrl+R for reply or Ctrl+Shift+R for reply all, then press Alt+I. Copilot has the thread as context, which means a prompt as short as “Agree to the Thursday date, decline the Friday one, and ask who will chair” produces a startlingly good reply.
User can also start with ALT+C in a blank email, user hear Copilot button. Navigate using down arrow keys to the suggestions to start with or hit enter to go to the Copilot pane and type your own prompt to start with the draft.
Copilot chat inside classic Outlook
Now we come to the feature that changes how you work rather than how you write.
Copilot chat gives you a conversation window that sits alongside Outlook and reasons across your mailbox, your calendar, and, with the right license, the rest of your organization’s information.
To open it, press F6 until you reach the app bar on the left of the window, arrow to the Copilot icon, and press Enter. There is also a Copilot button in the upper region of the window above the ribbon, which you can reach through the ribbon shortcuts or use ALT+C to access the same. Either route opens the same chat experience. Focus lands in an edit field where you type your prompt, and you press Enter to send it. Tab and the arrow keys move you through the response.
What you can do here depends on your license, and the difference is stark enough that it is worth being precise.
With the basic Copilot Chat tier, you can ask questions about your inbox, your calendar, and your meetings, and you can ask Copilot to take actions in Outlook. Useful requests include summarizing everything you received this week about a named project, asking when your next one-to-one with a particular colleague falls, asking Copilot to flag every unread message from your manager, asking it to set an automatic reply for a date you’ll be away, and asking it to draft a message pulling together the week’s escalations.
With a full Microsoft 365 Copilot license, Copilot reasons across your organization’s wider information as well, including chats, documents, and meetings. That opens up requests of a different order. You can ask it to identify which unread messages actually matter, summarize them, pull in related context from documents and chats, and tell you the order in which to reply. You can ask it to find your next meeting with a senior colleague, draft an agenda based on what you’re currently working on, and produce a first draft of a pre-read document. You can ask it to assemble an onboarding message for a new team member that includes what they should do in their first month and which documents they should read.
You can type a forward slash in the prompt box to reference a specific person, file, or meeting, which grounds your question in a particular source rather than leaving Copilot to guess. If the picker does not appear when you type the slash, name the person or the file in plain language instead. It works nearly as well.
A note on rhythm. Chat is a conversation, not a search box. Your second and third prompts are usually where the value appears. Ask, listen, then narrow. “Now show me only the ones where I was directly asked to do something” is the kind of follow-up that turns a long list into a short one.
Scheduling and preparing for meetings
Copilot can help you to schedule a meeting. You’ve been going back and forth on a thread and someone finally says the words “shall we just meet”. Open the message, and press Alt+C to navigate to Schedule with Copilot.
Copilot reads the thread, proposes a meeting title, drafts an agenda, works out who should be invited, attaches the thread to the invitation, checks everyone’s availability, and can book a room. You review the draft invitation and change anything you want before it goes out.
You can also do the same thing conversationally. In Copilot chat, ask it to set up a meeting with the people on a named project for some time next week, and it will find the times, propose them, and explain why it picked them. Copilot respects your working hours, your time zone, and your meeting preferences. If it cannot find a clean slot, it widens the search and tells you what it had to compromise on. You refine across several turns without losing the thread, changing the duration, the attendee list, or the location as you go.
For a screen reader user, this is a much better experience than the traditional scheduling assistant grid, which has always been one of the harder surfaces in Outlook to work with efficiently.
The second feature is meeting preparation. Navigate to a meeting on your calendar, and invoke the Context Menu either with the Application key or Shift+f10. Choose the Prepare option. Copilot gathers the context: what the meeting is about, who is attending, what was decided last time, which documents are relevant, and which tasks are still open. Each attendee sees a summary built only from information they have permission to access, so nothing leaks. You can also continue in chat and ask for deeper preparation on a specific point.
Use this feature as a habit, and you’ll walk in better briefed than most of the people in the room.
Copilot settings, and turning things off
The classic Outlook provides Copilot settings directly in the File menu. Press Alt, F to reach the backstage view, then navigate to the Copilot settings entry. From there you can review your Copilot options and switch Copilot on or off.
Verifying
Copilot sometimes makes mistakes. Not often, and less than it used to, but it does. In an email context the characteristic failure is subtle: it attributes a position to the wrong person in a long thread, or it converts “we discussed a possible June date” into “the June date was agreed”. The citations exist for this reason. Use them on anything that matters.
Copilot summarizes what is in the thread, not what is true. If two colleagues have been talking past each other for a week, the summary will faithfully reproduce that confusion in tidier prose. Tidier is not the same as resolved.
When something described in this module does not exist on your machine, check your channel and build before you conclude that anything is broken.
On privacy, the picture is reassuring. Copilot only reaches information you already have permission to access, your data stays within your organization’s Microsoft 365 boundary, and Microsoft does not use it to train public-facing models.
Working effectively, lessons learned
Some hard-earned lessons from using Copilot in classic Outlook as a screen reader user.
First, prompt with structure. Ask for a specific number of bullet points, in a specific order, focused on specific things. Structured output is navigable output, and navigable output is the whole point for us. “Summarize this” gives you a paragraph you have to read in full. “Summarize this in six bullets covering decisions, open questions, and who owes what by when” gives you something you can arrow through and act on.
Second, learn three keystrokes properly and the rest will follow. Alt+C will invoke a Copilot menu in most places.
Alt+I is for drafting when you are in the body of a message, be it a new one, or a reply.
Press F6 repeatedly until you find the chat pane.
Always read before you send. Copilot writes in your name. A draft you have not reviewed word by word is not your message yet. This is the single most important habit in the entire module.
Consider building a personal prompt library. Keep the prompts that work for you in a text file or a note, and paste them in. The prompt you refined for summarizing board papers will serve you every month for years.
Related resource
Use Microsoft Copilot in Classic Outlook with a screen reader