How to join Frontier early access?
In the https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/03/25/introducing-researcher-and-analyst-in-microsoft-365-copilot/ article, it states: Researcher and Analyst will start rolling out to customers with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license in April as part of a new “Frontier” program that gives customers early access to new Copilot innovations while they’re still in development. How can a company or individual enroll in the "Frontier" program?
Copilot not creating new documents
Hi I'm hoping someone can help. My company has just invested in Copilot for my team on my request and some of the functions it purports to have don't seem to work. When I ask it to create new word documents from a template, it tells me it is generating the documents but never actually does. Similarly, when I ask it to copy information from a word document and paste it into a spreadsheet, it tells me it has done it but hasn't. Has anyone else experienced this or know a fix for it? If it can't actually do this and create one document based on another document then its usefulness to me is vastly reduced. ThanksGet in Sync with OneDrive's biggest moments of 2024!
Wow, what an incredible year of updates, new innovations, announcements, and of course, time with you all-our valuable customers, partners, and OneDrive users to gain valuable feedback that helps drive our product to be great! I wanted to wrap up the year with highlights of some of our key moments to and share resources for you to indulge in. Reflecting on OneDrive's Recent Innovations As we look back on our journey this year, we’ve introduced many features and updates to the OneDrive experience. From AI-powered capabilities to improved user interfaces, these updates help you work faster and more efficiently. Some of those highlights include: Copilot in OneDrive (Web) One of the exciting features we announced was the general availability of Copilot in OneDrive for web. Copilot is there to help you work faster and smarter by generating summaries for large documents, comparing differences between multiple files, and answering complex questions using stored data. Whether generating ideas for new documents or quickly finding insights, Copilot became a valuable productivity companion. Copilot in OneDrive: Comparing files in a table Faster performance online or offline We've taken enhanced OneDrive's web experience for our users. Now, you can view, edit, and organize your files at lightning speed—even when you're offline. Whether you're browsing through large libraries or filtering documents, everything feels faster, smoother, and more responsive. Colored Folders on Windows We introduced colored folders in Windows File Explorer, bringing a splash of color to file organization. You can customize folders with different colors, making it easier to organize and locate files. Whether managing personal projects or work documents, colored folders added a touch of personalization to file management. Colored folders in Windows File Explorer Sync Admin Report Export Capability (Public Preview) For our IT admins, we rolled out the Sync Admin report export capability in public preview this year. Enabling you to export detailed sync reports, gaining valuable insights into your sync performance and troubleshooting sync-related concerns more effectively. Enhanced OneDrive Search experience We understand that searching for specific files among a mountain of documents can be time consuming. That's why we introduced a suite of enhancements to OneDrive, designed to optimize the search experience. These updates made it quicker and easier for you to locate the files you need, making the whole process faster and more efficient than ever before. OneDrive’s next generation improvements As part of our continued commitment to bring the best OneDrive experience to you all, we introduced new enhancements to work better across M365 apps. The integration of the OneDrive app in Outlook allows you to access your OneDrive files directly from Outlook, making it easier to share and collaborate on documents without leaving your email. And we can’t forget about Media view helping you find and enjoy your media files easier than ever. Whether you're organizing your photos or reviewing videos, this streamlined experience keeps your media content at your fingertips. OneDrive Media view These updates marked significant milestones in our journey to enhance the OneDrive experience. We are looking forward to continuing to innovate and bring you more exciting features and improvements in the near future! OneDrive Event-AI Innovations for a New Era of Work and Home This past October we had our second annual OneDrive event where we unveiled a powerful lineup of new features designed to help you work smarter, stay organized, and relive life’s best moments. OneDrive Event Visual We introduced OneDrive agents custom AI assistants, created by you and grounded in your rich content that exists in your files. We also got a glimpse of OneDrive's improved search capabilities and faster performance, both online and offline. New features and AI-driven features to improve security and management. For our customers who use OneDrive in their personal lives, we shared a look at the new OneDrive mobile app- a vibrant, photos-first experience. With a refreshed UI, users can rediscover, search, and share their favorite photo memories easier than ever. When users back up their phone’s photos to OneDrive, they can enjoy AI-curated memories of meaningful moments. Sit back, grab a snack, and see all these announcements and more! Microsoft OneDrive: AI Innovations for a New Era of Work and Home OneDrive Office Hours One of our favorite monthly occurrences from our product teams is our chance to connect with you directly. Each month we have hosted webinars on multiple special topics across OneDrive and leave time for great conversations and Q&A at the end. Customer Office Hours promo visual If you’ve missed any of this year’s session here is a list of our OnDemand content ready for your viewing pleasure: August-Copilot in OneDrive September-File Picker: seamless collaboration and file management October-Unlicensed OneDrive user accounts November-New Sync updates To stay updated on the latest Office Hours: Follow our blogs on Tech community Download the recurring calendar invite so you don’t miss out! Save the link https://aka.ms/OneDriveOfficeHours to register every month. Sync-Up Podcast Whether you love hearing about deep dive conversations with members of our product teams or seeing behind the scenes for some of our big events, the Sync Up Podcast has got you covered. Sync Up Podcast Episodes: OneDrive's Year in Review & Unlicensed User Changes In Focus—Designing for Copilot Data on the Move—Migrating to OneDrive From Waterfalls to Weekly Releases—Engineering Excellence with Steven Bailey and John Selbie Listen on your favorite platforms: Show: https://aka.ms/SyncUp | Apple Podcasts: https://aka.ms/SyncUp/Apple | Spotify: https://aka.ms/SyncUp/Spotify | RSS: https://aka.ms/SyncUp/RSS Your feedback is valuable to us! Please take our quick survey to suggest topics you'd like to see! A New Year of Innovation As we wrap up this incredible year, it was amazing to reflect on all the progress we've made together. From the introduction of AI-powered features to enhanced user experiences, OneDrive has truly evolved thanks to your feedback and support. Looking ahead, we're excited about the future and the innovations yet to come. We can't wait to continue this journey with you, bringing even more enhancements and features that will make your OneDrive experience better than ever. Thank you for being a part of our community and for your continued support. Here's to another year of growth, innovation, and success 🚀!Feature deep dive: Using PDFs in OneDrive and our journey thus far
PDFs are incredibly popular, used for everything from business documents to everyday tasks at home. In fact, over 100 billion PDFs were added to OneDrive and SharePoint in just last year – and its popularity as a file format shows no signs of slowing down. We can bet you’re fans of using PDF’s, and so we’re excited to walk you through everything you can do with this popular file format in OneDrive. Whether you're annotating documents, bookmarking pages, or merging PDF documents, OneDrive offers a robust set of tools to make managing PDFs effortless and efficient. There’s already so many things you can do with your PDF’s whether you’re using OneDrive at home or at work: Freemium PDF features in OneDrive OneDrive for Consumer OneDrive for Business Annotation and markup tools Easily collaborate and share feedback by using digital ink, highlighting text, drawing shapes, and inserting sticky notes directly onto your PDF files. ⚫ ⚫ Bookmark PDF pages Navigate effortlessly through lengthy documents by adding bookmarks to important sections, just like using tabs in a physical book. ⚫ (OneDrive for iOS/iPadOS and Android only.) ⚫ (OneDrive for iOS/iPadOS and Android only.) Change the appearance of your PDF Enhance your reading experience by adjusting the background color of your PDFs to dark mode, sepia mode, or light mode. Ideal for reading in different lighting conditions. ⚫ (OneDrive for Android only.) ⚫ (OneDrive for Android only.) Rotate PDF pages Correct the orientation of scanned documents by rotating individual or multiple pages 90° clockwise. Perfect for fixing upside-down or sideways pages. ⚫ ⚫ Jump to specific PDF page Quickly access specific sections by jumping directly to any page in your PDF documents with just a click. ⚫ ⚫ Display table of content Effortlessly navigate through long documents using the clickable table of contents. ⚫ (Coming soon to OneDrive for web) ⚫ (Coming soon to OneDrive for web) Premium PDF features in OneDrive OneDrive for Consumer [1] OneDrive for Business [2] Extract PDF pages Easily extract specific pages from your PDF documents to create new, smaller files. Ideal for sharing only the most relevant sections. ⚫ ⚫ Merge PDFs Seamlessly combine multiple PDFs into a single, organized document. Perfect for consolidating reports, presentations, and more. ⚫ ⚫ [1] Premium features are available to OneDrive users with M365 Basic, M365 Personal and Family subscriptions. [2] Premium features are accessible to all OneDrive commercial users with SharePoint in their subscription plan. Let’s take a look first at the features that you can use for free on OneDrive. Enhance Collaboration with Annotation and Markup Tools PDFs are used in a variety of collaboration scenarios, and to help, we are releasing new annotation and markup features for easier collaboration. Imagine you’re working on a project with your team, and you need to share feedback or highlight important sections of a PDF. Instead of sending endless emails or starting chats, you can simply use the PDF annotation tools available in OneDrive. These features allow you to use digital, hand-drawn ink, highlight text, draw shapes, and even insert sticky notes directly onto your PDF. The annotations and notes appear on your document when you share them with other colleagues via OneDrive. Here's how you can easily annotate a PDF in OneDrive: Find the PDF you want to annotate in your OneDrive and tap to open it. At the bottom of the screen, tap on Annotation to enter editing mode. Choose an annotation tool from the bottom of the screen or select a drawing markup tool from the top. Change the pen color by tapping on the color picker at the bottom of the screen and choose from any of the preset colors. You can also adjust the thickness and transparency of the ink here. When you're done, just tap Done at the top left of the screen, and then tap Save at the top right, to save your changes back to OneDrive. Now when you share your annotated PDF via OneDrive, your colleagues will see your annotations too. Navigate PDFs Effortlessly with Bookmarks Scrolling through a lengthy PDF document and trying to locate a specific section can be a frustrating experience, right? That's where the PDF bookmark feature is handy. Think of bookmarks in PDFs as your personal navigation tool, much like the tabs you might use in a physical book. They allow you and recipients to easily jump directly to important sections with just a click, making your reading experience smoother and more enjoyable. To use bookmarks: At the bottom of the screen, tap Bookmark to add a bookmark to the current page you’re viewing. After adding a bookmark, you'll see a confirmation dialog at the top of the screen. To view all the pages with bookmarks, tap the Thumbnail icon at the top right of the screen. At the top of the screen, tap Bookmarked to see only the pages with bookmarks. From this view, you can also navigate to a specific page by tapping on it. From the All Pages view, you can select multiple pages to add new bookmarks or remove existing ones. Jump to Specific Sections with Table of Contents Also helping you to more easily navigate a lengthy PDF is OneDrive’s handy Table of Contents feature. When your PDF has an embedded table of contents, OneDrive will display the chapter or section titles along with their page numbers, making it a snap to jump to specific chapters or sections. To view a PDF’s table of contents: If the PDF includes the necessary metadata for a table of contents, you'll see an icon at the top right of the screen. Clicking on it, opens the table of contents. The table of contents with clickable chapters or sections will appear on the left side of the screen. Optimized PDF Viewing with Reading Mode You might have to read a PDF under varying lighting conditions. You can maximize your comfortability and readability of your document by adjusting the Appearance of that PDF. When viewing a PDF in OneDrive, you can adjust the background to dark mode, sepia mode, or light mode, making it easy to read no matter the type of environment. To change the appearance of a PDF: Open a PDF in OneDrive for Android and tap to expand the bottom sheet of the screen. Tap Appearance. In the Appearance window, select the colored circle for day, night, or sepia mode. Adjusting a PDF’s Orientation with Page Rotation With PDF page rotation, you can simply adjust the orientation of any of the pages within a PDF document. This is especially useful for fixing multi-page scanned documents that may have been saved upside down or sideways. With the Rotation feature, you can choose to rotate all pages or just specific ones within your PDF. To rotate a single page: Open the OneDrive iOS or Android app, then open the PDF with the page you want to rotate. Scroll to the page which you want to rotate. Press anywhere there isn’t text. Once a menu pops up, tap Rotate to rotate the page 90 degrees clockwise. To rotate multiple pages: Open the OneDrive iOS or Android app, then open the PDF with the pages you want to rotate. At the top of your screen, tap the grid icon to show a thumbnail view of the PDF’s pages. Tap Select. Tap to select the pages which you want to rotate or tap Select all if you want to rotate them all. Tap the rotate icon on the toolbar along the bottom of your screen to rotate all the selected pages 90 degrees clockwise. Exploring OneDrive’s Premium PDF Features Now that we’ve explored all the free PDF features available, let’s dive into some exciting features available to our M365 Consumer customers with M365 Basic, M365 Personal, or M365 Family, and to our M365 Business customers with SharePoint Premium.. Extract Pages from PDFs For our M365 paid customers, you can easily split a PDF into multiple smaller PDFs using the Extract tool. This makes it simple to pick and separate the pages you need, creating a brand-new (shorter) PDF file in just a snap! How to split a PDF file using the Extract feature on OneDrive for Web: Open the PDF file you want to split. At the top left of the screen, click Extract action Select page(s) to extract then click Extract on top left of the screen. Choose where you’d like to save the new PDF file. You can also rename the file at the bottom of the save dialog then click Save here. When finished, a confirmation dialog appears at the bottom of the screen. This feature also works on OneDrive on iOS, iPadOS, and Android. Here’s how: Open the PDF file you want to split. At the top left of the screen, tap see more button (…) to see the new menu. Select Extract from the menu options. Merge Multiple PDFs While the Extract feature let’s you pick out individual pages from a PDF, the Merge feature lets you easily combine multiple PDF files into a single PDF. It’s a simple as picking the files you want to merge, and voila – you’ve got a brand-new, merged PDF saved directly to your OneDrive or SharePoint Document Library. Here’s how you can easily merge multiple PDF files into one PDF on OneDrive for web: Open one of the PDF files you want to combine in OneDrive for Web. At the top left of the screen, click Merge action. Choose two or more PDF files you want to merge from the merge dialog box. You can drag and drop the files to rearrange their order. Once done, click Next. Choose where you’d like to save the new PDF file. You can also rename the file at the bottom of the save dialog then click Save here. When finished, a confirmation dialog appears at the bottom of the screen. Just like Extract, you can also use Merge on OneDrive on iOS, iPadOS, and Android: Open one of the PDF files you want to combine in OneDrive. At the top left of the screen, tap see more button (…) to see the new menu. Select Merge. Thanks We've been on a focused journey enhancing the PDF features in OneDrive, because we know that for so many of our customers, it’s their file format of choice. We hope you find our new and existing PDF features in OneDrive useful in your life at work or at home. But we don't want to stop here, and we need your feedback to keep improving! Dive into these features, give them a spin, and let us know what you think. What works great? What could be better? And most importantly, what do you want to see next? Drop your comments below or fill this short survey directly. Your insights are invaluable, and together, we can make OneDrive the ultimate tool for all your PDF needs. Happy exploring! 📄✨ About the Author Belle Podeanu is a product manager at Microsoft. She collaborates with Office, Edge, and other platforms to provide comprehensive cross-device functionalities for OneDrive and SharePoint, including productivity features and Copilot-enabled experiences. In her free time, she enjoys playing soul-like games, ARPGs, MMOs, and asymmetrical games. Stay updated on OneDrive and SharePoint news by connecting with Belle here.
