Status: Recently rolled out
Audience: Microsoft 365 Copilot users
So yeah…Users can now ask Copilot in SharePoint to create Word documents, Excel workbooks, or PowerPoint presentations directly from the content available in a SharePoint site. Lovely! For example, a program manager could turn project notes and reports into a first draft of a management presentation.
This may look like not a big deal, but this actually removes a familiar series of manual steps
Practical impact for end users
Usually a user would have to follow along the route of these steps:
- Find several source documents.
- Open them in multiple tabs.
- Copy relevant information.
- Paste it into a new document.
- Reformat everything.
- Discover that one source was outdated.
The SharePoint of interest here is: this feature is not hidden somewhere in Word, PowerPoint or Excel. The experience starts directly inside SharePoint, via the Copilot button that appears on sites, pages, libraries and files. So…about anywhere the user might be 🙂
Users can instead begin from the information already stored in the site and create a draft deliverable in context. They ommit quite a lot of copy-pasting this way. Of course there is a little catch…
Three things: You must have a Copilot licence (suprised?)… And…Have access to the SharePoint site and source content, cause Copilot only works with content the user is permitted to access (gasp!). And yeah, have Copilot in SharePoint available for that site.
Methods of creation
With things set in place, there are a couple of ways to go about creating a document. Let’s dive into these approaches!
Method 1: Create a document from a SharePoint Site
- Step 1: Open the SharePoint site. You can do this! Navigate to the SharePoint site containing the information you want to use.
- Step 2: Open Copilot. Just look for the Copilot button in SharePoint and select it. Spoiler: it is in the top right (at moment of writing of course haha) And of couse, as said before, Copilot can be opened from about anywhere, there’s no escaping it! Like: A SharePoint site, a page, your document library, a list as well and then there is the individual file…but that is the other method.
- Step 3: Enter a prompt (who would’ve thunk?) In the Copilot chat window, ask Copilot to create an Office file based on the site’s content. So for your imagination, here’s some examples: “Create a Word document summarizing the project status reports and meeting notes from this site”. Or how about: “Create a PowerPoint presentation for management based on the project reports on this site. Include key milestones, risks, budget status and next steps”. And or course the green machine: “Create an Excel workbook from the Project Tracking list. Include all columns and add a summary sheet showing project status by owner”.
- Fact check… Copilot generates the file and saves it in SharePoint. Even Microsoft stresses that generated files are drafts and must be validated by the user. So just review some important things such as:
- Content accuracy
- Source selection
- Formatting
- Missing information
- Outdated information
Method 2: Create a document from a Library
This is often the most practical scenario.
- Step 1. Open a document library. Sleak and simple
- Step 2. Select the Copilot button at the top of the library. Of course it’s there as well!
- Step 3. Use a prompt such as: “Summarize all strategy documents in this library into a PowerPoint presentation for executives”. Or maybe: “Create a Word document that combines the information from the onboarding documents in this library into a single employee handbook”. Lovely! Just let your imagination run free.
- Step 4. Copilot analyzes the content within the library scope and generates the requested output. All you need to do is review, review, review.
Method 3: Create a document from a specific file
This…kinda looks like how most people use Copilot Chat, because the prompt is scoped to the specific file, Copilot grounds its output on that document rather than the whole site. Sounds familiar? Anyhow, the difference is that is immediately uses the decidated SharePoint library/site as a storage. So here’s the steps:
- Step 1. Open a SharePoint document.
- Step 2. Launch Copilot from the file context. (either top right of lower right, they keep changing this).
- Step 3. Prompt something like: “Create a PowerPoint presentation based on this document”, or “Create an Excel workbook summarizing the data and recommendations in this report”.
- Step 4. Can you guess? Yeah…that’s right, REVIEW
Things to relay to your end-users:
As usual, there are a couple of things that would be nice to have in your users backpack of knowlegde to take along their SharePoint journey:
- The result is a draft, not an approved business record. So yeah, you might have to click a confirm button or 2 to actually turn in into a document. In that regards, it’s about the same a drafting an email with Copilot. You are still in charge and still have to confirm that it is actually a thing you wanna have.
- Copilot may select information that is available but not authoritative. Always a blast! Especially if you have some redundant, obsolete or trivial stuff all over your SharePoint place, like stuff in your attic, gathering dust, forgotten by a generation and a half untill a magic robot thinks that info is valuable treasure.
- Generated documents can quickly become new duplicates of existing information. The age-old question of: do you really need this document? What is its unique purpose and who maintains ownership over it?
- A generated PowerPoint may be accurate at creation time but disconnected from subsequent source updates. Ah…yes…just like the thing bloggers, speakers and admins are united together in. The familiar thing having spend hours creating a nice slidedeck or governance document and the next morning, Microsoft has changed some things. Huzzah 😀
- Users must understand when to cite, verify, or link to the original source. Oh…and maybe how to add some metadata to the new document now that you’re at it 🙂
Fun things for admins:
Before this feature, poor information architecture mainly made finding information difficult. With Copilot in SharePoint, poor information architecture can directly influence the content AI creates.
For regulated or policy-heavy environments, authoritative sites and content ownership become increasingly important. AI makes content creation easier, but it also makes content proliferation easier. Add to that mix some non-existant governance, a lack of admin(s) and a vague idea about compliance policies that is lost to the void and you get a whole new mess.
Since Copilot generates documents from whatever content it can access, organizations need:
- Clear ownership
- Authoritative source locations
- Managed content lifecycle
- Retention and version control
- Content review processes
Otherwise Copilot doesn’t just find outdated information faster, it can also package it into a polished PowerPoint in seconds!
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