Your first day with Copilot, without the confusion.
Microsoft put Copilot everywhere — which is exactly why day one is confusing. Free or paid? App or sidebar? Work data or web data? This lesson untangles it and gets you to five real wins before lunch.
01 Which Copilot do you actually have?
There are really two Copilots, and knowing which one you're in explains almost everything:
| Version | Where | What it knows |
|---|---|---|
| Copilot (free / consumer) | copilot.microsoft.com, Windows, Edge, the mobile app | The web + what you type. Great general assistant; knows nothing about your files or email. |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot (paid, work) | Inside Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, PowerPoint + the M365 Copilot app | All of the above plus your work — your emails, files, meetings, and chats, permission-aware. |
The quickest tell: open Copilot and ask "summarize my unread email." If it can, you have the work version. If it politely can't, you're on consumer Copilot — still very useful, different job. (Licensing and prices: our what Copilot costs lesson.)
Microsoft is merging these two apps into one Copilot app that you sign into with a personal account, a work or school account, or both. The split in the table doesn’t disappear — your work data and your personal data stay separated inside the single app — but the two icons become one, and three consumer features are being retired. What changes, and the one thing to do before it happens ↓
02 Three settings before anything else
03 Five first wins (work version)
- "Summarize my unread email and flag anything that needs a reply today."
- "What did I commit to in meetings this week?"
- In Word: "Draft a one-page summary of [attached/linked document] for a customer."
- In Excel, on a real sheet: "What are the three biggest changes vs last month?"
- In Teams, after any meeting you missed: "What happened, what was decided, what's mine?"
On the free version, swap in: rewrite an email, summarize a long article in Edge's sidebar, draft a quote from bullet points, photograph a document with the app and ask questions about it.
Copilot's superpower isn't intelligence — it's proximity. It's already inside the apps where your work lives. The winning habit is asking in place: in Outlook about email, in Excel about the sheet — not copy-pasting your work life into a separate chat window.
Run the tell ("summarize my unread email"), then do whichever five-wins list matches your version. Before lunch.
Open Copilot →04 What changes on August 18, 2026
Microsoft is collapsing the two apps from section 01 into a single updated Copilot app. You sign in with a personal account, a work or school account, or both, and move between them with the account switcher. Work and personal stay separated by design, and Microsoft is explicit that data does not flow between them — commercial data boundaries, tenant controls and compliance protections are not changing. Account updates begin August 18, 2026, which is the start of a rollout rather than a single-day switch, so yours may flip later than that.
| If this is you | What actually happens |
|---|---|
| Consumer Copilot (personal Microsoft, Google or Apple sign-in) | You get moved to the updated Copilot. Chat history and most content comes with you, and the web redirects automatically. On mobile you may need to install the updated app yourself. |
| The M365 Copilot app, personal account | Appearance, navigation and the icon change. If you were using it without a Microsoft 365 subscription, you now get Copilot chat at no extra cost. |
| Both apps, personal account | Your chats and content merge into the one app — but stay separated by account type inside it. |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot for work or school | New icon and name, minimal change otherwise. Your admin’s controls carry over untouched. |
Three consumer features are being retired
- Group Chat. The history survives, but every group chat becomes a one-to-one conversation with Copilot that you cannot continue as a group — and prompts or artifacts shared by other participants, images included, stop being accessible.
- Podcasts. Retired; you can neither create nor open them afterwards. Individual podcasts can be saved first using the download option in the podcast menu.
- Deep Research. Retired in the Copilot app for consumers. This is not the Researcher agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot at work, which is a different feature and is unaffected.
Files you shared or generated in the standalone Copilot app move to OneDrive, where you manage them like anything else in your storage.
This week's challenge
Each workday this week, ask Copilot one question inside a different app — Outlook Monday, Teams Tuesday, Word Wednesday, Excel Thursday, and Friday ask the M365 app to recap your week. Five days, five surfaces: after that you'll know exactly where Copilot earns its seat for you.