As part of the Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2 changes, Copilot in OneDrive became available for all commercial customers on 8th October 2024. Let’s check it out and see what it can do.

When first logging onto https://www.office.com/onedrive I was greeted with two prompts, the notice that Copilot is now there, as well as the reminder that you need to verify the results that Copilot provides – just like any LLM AI.

From the front Onedrive page, I do see the Copilot icon as indicated:

Using a draft of an article I recently wrote on TechTarget – Microsoft Purview Audit helps IT flush out bad behavior, the Copilot icon shows the following options: Summarize, Create an FAQ, and Ask a question.

The Summarize option does as you’d expect, providing a less than 1 pager with key points that Copilot has found out from the document:

The ‘Ask a question’ button will break out a Copilot side window which will then provide answers based on the content of the document, and show the reference of the document itself as the source of the answers it generates:

‘Create an FAQ’ is quite a handy one-click option. I can see this being useful in many scenarios – any documentation being shared that could be a lot to take on, and the question/answer format can be a better way for people to absorb information compared to a summary.

If you select two files, Copilot in the top bar will have the option ‘Compare files’:

I made a copy of the above file and changed 3 words, let’s see if the changes are picked up when using the ‘Compare files’ option:

This is a good expectation setter. If you wanted to actually compare differences between two documents and see what’s exactly different, use Word’s native Compare option. Copilot on the other hand will give a summary. It’s picked up that there’s possibly minor differences in wording or formatting

If I make another copy of the original, make no changes, and run another ‘Compare files’, the results come back suggesting that the content is most likely identical:

I can see this contextual Copilot being useful when you target the file or files you want summarised, or want to ask questions about. Contextual questions relating to a project or a piece of work is where this would shine.

It’s still early days for Microsoft 365 Copilot, but it’s good to see the product’s feature set expand as we all learn what large language models can actually do and how they can help us be more efficient in our jobs and lives.

Note: After writing the above, I then found this article summarising similar content https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/office/get-started-with-copilot-in-onedrive-7fc81e10-e0cf-4da8-af2e-9876a2770e5d but did not read or use any of it for my own post. This link may be useful for communicating the changes to end users.