Two paths. Try the Coach for a ready-to-paste prompt, or read the guide to understand what makes a prompt land.
A prompt is a brief — instructions you give to Copilot. The difference between asking for “a summary” and asking for “a 250-word readout for the steering group, with decisions, risks, and next milestones”.
Good prompts have five parts. The Coach below builds them for you. If you ever write your own, this shape is what to aim for.
Skip to the Coach👋 Hi — let’s get your prompt right. Tell me what you need, and I’ll shape it into a prompt that works.
Ready-to-use prompts for things you do most weeks. Click any card for the full prompt and what good output looks like.
Pick a task. See the rough version, the clearer version, and the lift.
"Summarise this meeting."
"Summarise this steering-group meeting for the programme director. Highlight decisions, unresolved risks, and next actions."
"Write a status report for the project."
"Draft a Phase 2 status update for the steering group. Schedule, top three risks with mitigations, decisions needed, next milestone. 250 words."
"Pull out the risks from this workshop transcript."
"Extract every risk raised. For each: short title, category, likely owner, one-line mitigation if discussed. Return as a table. Mark anything unclear as 'needs validation'."
"Make this brief shorter."
"Distil into a 1-pager for a client CFO. Decision being asked, three options, recommended option with rationale, 30/60/90-day actions. No jargon. Flag any uncertainty."
"Help me write an email about the delay."
"Draft an escalation note to the client sponsor about a three-week slip. Three short paragraphs: impact, cause and mitigation, ask of them. Don't assign blame. Don't promise dates we haven't confirmed."
The Coach handles these for you. Useful to know if you write your own.
Each of these moments is a prompting moment. Walk a typical day to see them in flow.
Use Outlook Copilot to summarise threads, surface decisions, and draft holding replies.
Open TriageBuild a one-page brief from the last decisions, open actions, and stakeholder positions.
Open PrepOutline → draft → tighten. Same prompt, three passes, each with a different format ask.
Open ProduceAsk Copilot to challenge the draft as a sceptical reader, with explicit boundaries.
Open ReviewPatterns to reach for when one prompt isn’t enough. Skip on first read.
For deliverables with several stages — outline, draft, tighten — run separate prompts rather than one mega-prompt. Each step gets a clearer instruction and the output of one becomes the input of the next.
When to use: reports, business cases, anything over a page where structure matters.
When you build a Copilot agent grounded in a folder or notebook, the prompt is permanent — every user inherits it. Be explicit about scope, citation rules, and refusal behaviour. State what to do when the answer isn't in the source.
When to use: project assistants, knowledge agents, recurring workflows shared across a team.
One prompt extracts, the next classifies, the next summarises. Keep each step single-purpose. The chain is easier to debug than one prompt trying to do everything.
When to use: consultation analysis, transcript processing, anything tabular at scale.
If the output shape is hard to describe, paste a 2-line example of what good looks like. AI matches patterns more reliably than it follows abstract instructions.
Next chapter: see these prompts inside a real day at work.