June 2026 | Microsoft 365 Champion community call | 5:05 PM PT
Join our next community call on June 23, 2026, to explore Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork and learn how it can really help you get stuff done. Host: Josh Leporati Guest: Jessie Hwang, Brea Davenport, Shinhe Cho Moderator: Jessie Hwang 📢 NOTE: our community call formats are Teams webinars so you must register at https://aka.ms/M365ChampionCallPM to receive the link to join. The join link will be sent to you in email with your webinar registration confirmation. 🗨️ Each call includes an open Q&A discussion section at the end, where you'll have a chance to ask your questions about Microsoft 365. 👋 Was this forwarded to you? Join the Microsoft 365 Champion program today! Champions combine technical acumen with people skills to drive meaningful change. Our community calls are open to everyone, but only Champion program members have access to the presentation resources (access link is in the initial welcome email and in the monthly newsletters). Join now: https://aka.ms/M365Champions. 🎥 The recording will be available on demand on the Driving Adoption community and our YouTube Community Learning channel later in the week. Note: If you are unable to watch the recording on YouTube, try watching it here.June 2026 | Microsoft 365 Champion community call | 8:05 AM PT
Join our next community call on June 23, 2026, to explore Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork and learn how it can really help you get stuff done. Host: Josh Leporati Guest: Jessie Hwang, Brea Davenport, Shinhe Cho Moderator: Jessie Hwang 📢 NOTE: our community call formats are Teams webinars so you must register at https://aka.ms/M365ChampionCallAM to receive the link to join. The join link will be sent to you in email with your webinar registration confirmation. 🗨️ Each call includes an open Q&A discussion section at the end, where you'll have a chance to ask your questions about Microsoft 365. 👋 Was this forwarded to you? Join the Microsoft 365 Champion program today! Champions combine technical acumen with people skills to drive meaningful change. Our community calls are open to everyone, but only Champion program members have access to the presentation resources (access link is in the initial welcome email and in the monthly newsletters). Join now: https://aka.ms/M365Champions. 🎥 The recording will be available on demand on the Driving Adoption community and our YouTube Community Learning channel later in the week. Note: If you are unable to watch the recording on YouTube, try watching it here.Oversharing Control at Enterprise Scale | Updates for Microsoft 365 Copilot in Microsoft Purview
Minimize risks that come with oversharing and potential data loss. Use Microsoft Purview and its new Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) for AI insights, along with new Data Loss Prevention policies for Microsoft 365 Copilot, and SharePoint Advanced Management, which is now included with Microsoft 365 Copilot. Automate site access reviews at scale and add controls to restrict access to sites if they contain highly sensitive information. Erica Toelle, Microsoft Purview Senior PM, shows how to control data visibility, automate site access reviews, and fine-tune permissions with Pilot, Deploy, Optimize phases. Protect your data from unwanted exposure. Find and secure high-risk SharePoint sites with Microsoft Purview’s oversharing report. Start here. Secure Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption at scale. Check out the Pilot-Deploy-Optimize approach, to align AI use with your organization’s data governance. Watch here. Boost security, compliance, and governance. Scoped DLP policies enable Microsoft 365 Copilot to respect data labels. Take a look. Watch our video here. QUICK LINKS: 00:00 — Minimize risk of oversharing 01:24 — Oversharing scenarios 04:03 — How oversharing can occur 05:38 — Restrict discovery & limit access 06:36 — Scope sites 07:15 — Pilot phase 08:16 — Deploy phase 09:17 — Site access reviews 10:00 — Optimize phase 10:54 — Wrap up Link References Check out https://aka.ms/DeployM365Copilot Watch our show on the basics of oversharing at https://aka.ms/SMBoversharing Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics? As Microsoft’s official video series for IT, you can watch and share valuable content and demos of current and upcoming tech from the people who build it at Microsoft. Subscribe to our YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community:https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog Watch or listen from anywhere, subscribe to our podcast:https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/podcast Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: Follow us on Twitter:https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics Share knowledge on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ Enjoy us on Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ Loosen up with us on TikTok:https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics Video Transcript: -Are you looking to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot at scale, but concerned that your information is overshared? Ultimately, you want to ensure that your users and teams can only get to the data required to do their jobs and nothing more. For example, while using Microsoft 365 Copilot and interacting with work data, you don’t want information surfaced that users should not have permissions to view. So, where do you even start to solve for this? You might have hundreds or thousands of SharePoint sites to assess and right-size information access. Additionally, knowing where your sensitive or high value information resides and making sure that the policies you set to protect information continuously and avoid returning to an oversharing state, can come with challenges. -The good news is there are a number of updated tools and resources available to help you get a handle on all this. In the next few minutes, I’ll unpack the approach you can take to help you minimize the risks that come with oversharing and potential data loss using Microsoft Purview and its new Data Security Posture Management for AI insights, along with new Data Loss Prevention policies for Microsoft 365 Copilot and more. And SharePoint Advance Management, which is now included with Microsoft 365 Copilot. This helps you automate site access reviews at scale and adds controls to restrict access to sites even if they contain highly sensitive information. First, let’s look at how information oversharing can inadvertently occur just as it would with everyday search when using Microsoft 365 Copilot. -I’ll explain how it works. When you submit a prompt before presenting that to a large language model, the prompt is interpreted by Copilot and using a process called Retrieval Augmented Generation it then finds and retrieves grounding information that you are allowed to access in places like SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, your email and calendar, and optionally the internet, as well as other connected data sources. The retrieved information is appended to your prompt as additional context. Then that larger prompt is presented to the large language model. With that added grounding information, the response is generated then formatted for the app that you’re using. For this to work well, that information retrieval step relies on accurate search. And what’s important here is as you use Copilot it can only retrieve information that you explicitly have access to and nothing else. This is how search works in Microsoft 365 and SharePoint. The controls you put in place to achieve just enough access will reduce data security risk, whether you intend to use Microsoft 365 Copilot or not. -So, let me show you a few examples you may have experienced where content is overshared. I’ll start in Business Chat. I’m logged in is Adele Vance from the sales team. Her customers are pressuring her for information about new products that haven’t been internally or externally announced. She submits a prompt for 2025 product plans and the response returns a few clearly sensitive documents that she shouldn’t have access to, and the links in the response and in the citations take Adele right to those files. -Now, I’m going to switch perspectives to someone on the product planning team building the confidential plan stored in a private SharePoint site. I’m working on the 2025 product plan on a small team. This is the same doc that Adele just found in Business Chat, and if you look at the top of the document right now, there was one other person who I expect in the document. Then suddenly a few more people appear to have the document open and I don’t know who these people are and they shouldn’t be here. So, this file is definitely overshared. -Now, I’m going to switch back to Adele’s perspective as beyond the product planning doc. The response also describes a new project with the code name Thunderbolt. So, I’ll choose the Copilot recommended prompt to provide more details about Project Thunderbolt, and we can see a couple of recent documents with information that I as Adele should not have access to as a member of the sales team. In fact, if I open the file, I can get right to the detailed specifications and pricing information. -Now, let’s dig into the potential reasons why this is happening, and then I’ll cover how you discover and correct these conditions at enterprise scale. First, privacy settings for SharePoint sites can be set to public or private. These settings are most commonly configured as sites are created. Often sites are set to public, which means anyone in your organization can find content contained within those sites, and by extension, so can Microsoft 365 Copilot. -Next, is setting the default sharing option to everyone in an organization. One common misperception here is just by creating the link, you’re enabling access to that file, folder, or site automatically. That’s not how these links work though. Once a sharing link is redeemed or clicked on by the recipient, that person will have access to and be able to search for the shared content. There are, however, sharing approaches, which auto-redeem sharing links, such as pasting the link into an email and sending that to lots of people. In that case, those recipients have access to the content and will be able to search for it immediately. -Related to this is granting permissions to the everyone except external users group, as you define membership for your SharePoint sites. This group gives everyone in your organization access and the ability to search for that information too. And you’ll also want to look into permissions granted to other large and inclusive groups, which are often maintained using dynamic group membership. And if you’re using Data Loss Prevention, information protection, or other classification controls from Microsoft Purview, labeled content can also trigger sharing restrictions. -So, let’s move on to addressing these common issues and the controls you will use in Microsoft 365, Microsoft Purview, and SharePoint Advance Management. At a high level, there are two primary ways to implement protections. The first approach is to restrict content discovery so that information doesn’t appear in search. Restricting discovery still allows users to access content they’ve previously accessed as well as the content shared with them. The downsides are that content people should not have access to is still accessible, and importantly, Copilot cannot work with restricted content even if it’s core to a person’s job. So, we recommend restricting content discovery as a short-term solution. -The second approach is to limit information access by tightening permissions on sites, folders, and individual files. This option has stronger protections against data loss and users can still request access, if they need it to do their jobs. Meaning only people who need access have access. We recommend limiting access as an ongoing best practice. Then to scope the sites that you want to allow and protect, we provide a few options to help you know where to start. First, you can use the SharePoint Active sites list where you can sort by activity to discover which SharePoint sites should be universally accessible for all employees in your organization. Then as part of the new Data Security Posture Management for AI reporting in Microsoft Purview, the oversharing report lets you easily find the sites with higher risk containing the most sensitive information that you want to protect. The sites you define to allow access and limit access will be used in later steps. Now, let’s move on to the steps for repairing your data from Microsoft 365 Copilot. We’ve mapped best practices and tools for Copilot adoption across Pilot, Deploy, and Optimize phases. -First, in the Pilot phase, we recommend organization-wide controls to easily restrict discovery when using Copilot. This means taking your list of universally accessible sites previously mentioned, then using a capability called Restricted SharePoint search, where you can create and allow list of up to 100 sites, then allow just those sites to be used with search in Copilot. Then in parallel in Microsoft Purview, we’ll configure ways to get visibility into Copilot usage patterns where you can enable audit mode using Data Loss Prevention policies to detect sharing of labeled or unlabeled sensitive content. And likewise, you’ll enable analysis of Copilot interactions as a part of communication compliance. Again, these approaches do not impact information access only discoverability via Copilot and search. -Now, let’s move on to the broader Deploy phase where you will enable Copilot for more users. Here you’ll use the list of identified sites from Microsoft Purview’s oversharing report to identify sites with the most sensitive information. Controls in Microsoft Purview provide proactive information protection with sensitivity labels for your files, emails, meetings, groups, and sites. For each item, you can use more targeted controls to right-size site access by assigning permissions to specific users and groups. And when applied, these controls on the backend will move public sites to private and control access to defined site members based on the permissions you set. Next, you can enable new Data Loss Prevention from Microsoft 365 Copilot policies to exclude specific labels from Copilot prompts and responses. And you can change your DLP policies from the audit mode that you set during the Pilot phase to start blocking unnecessary sharing of labeled content where you’ll now turn on the policies in order to enforce them. -Then, two options from SharePoint Advance Management are to use restricted access control to limit access to individual sites. That way only members in defined security groups will have access, and to limit site access by operationalizing site owner access reviews. Then as an additional fine-tuning option, you can target restricted content discovery on individual sites, like you see here with our leadership site to prevent Copilot from using their content as you continue to work through access management controls. And as part of the Deploy phase, you’ll disable restricted SharePoint search once you have the right controls in place. Together, these options will impact both access permissions, as well as discovery via Copilot and search. -Next, the final Optimize phase is about setting your organization up for the long term. This includes permissioning, information classifications, and data lifecycle management. Here you’ll continually monitor your data security risks using oversharing reports. Then implement auto-labeling and classification strategies using Microsoft Purview, and ensure that as new sites are created, site owners and automated provisioning respect access management principles. These processes help ensure that your organization doesn’t drift back into an oversharing state to keep your data protected and ongoing permissions in check. Now, if we switch back to our initial user examples in Business Chat with our controls in place, if we try the same prompts as before, you’ll see that Adele can no longer access sensitive information, even if she knows exactly what to look for in her prompts. The data is now protected and access has been right-sized for everyone in the organization. -So, those are the steps and tools to prepare your information from Microsoft 365 Copilot at enterprise scale, and help ensure that your data is protected and that everyone has just enough access to do their jobs. To learn more, check out aka.ms/DeployM365Copilot. Also, watch our recent show on the basics of oversharing at aka.ms/SMBoversharing for more tips to rightsize permissions for SharePoint site owners. Keep watching Microsoft Mechanics for the latest updates and thanks for watching.Upcoming June 2026 Microsoft 365 Champion community call
Join our next community call on June 23, 2026, to explore Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork and learn how it can really help you get stuff done. Reminder: Our community calls are in the Teams webinar format, so you must register to receive the link to join. The join link will be sent to you in email with your webinar registration confirmation. https://aka.ms/M365ChampionCallAM https://aka.ms/M365ChampionCallPM The calls will still start at 5 minutes past the hour for both sessions (at 8:05 AM and 5:05 PM PT), and it will still end at the top of the hour (9:00 AM and 6:00 PM PT, respectively). While our calls are open to everyone, you must be a member of the Microsoft 365 Champion Program in order to access the presentation materials - the access link is in the initial welcome email and the monthly newsletter emails sent the week before the community calls. An on-demand recording will still be available on our Driving Adoption > Events pages, as well as on our Microsoft Community Learning YouTube channel. If you have not yet joined our Champion community, sign up here to get access to the monthly newsletters, calendar invites, and program assets (e.g., the presentations).Microsoft 365 Champion community call | May 2026 | PM
Join our next community call on May 26, 2026, to explore the new Copilot Hub experience and learn more about Agent 365. Host: Tiffany Lee Guests: Jessie Hwang, Samer Baroudi Moderators: Jessie Hwang, Casandra Marrero, Abby Schilbach 📢 NOTE: our community call formats are Teams webinars so you must register at https://aka.ms/M365ChampionCallPM to receive the link to join. The join link will be sent to you in email with your webinar registration confirmation. 🗨️ Each call includes an open Q&A discussion section at the end, where you'll have a chance to ask your questions about Microsoft 365. 👋 Was this forwarded to you? Join the Microsoft 365 Champion program today! Champions combine technical acumen with people skills to drive meaningful change. Our community calls are open to everyone, but only Champion program members have access to the presentation resources (access link is in the initial welcome email and in the monthly newsletters). Join now: https://aka.ms/M365Champions. Note: If you are unable to watch the recording on YouTube, try watching it here.Microsoft 365 Champion community call | May 2026 | AM
Join our next community call on May 26, 2026, to explore the new Copilot Hub experience and learn more about Agent 365. Host: Tiffany Lee Guests: Jessie Hwang, Samer Baroudi Moderators: Jessie Hwang, Casandra Marrero, Abby Schilbach 📢 NOTE: our community call formats are Teams webinars so you must register at https://aka.ms/M365ChampionCallAM to receive the link to join. The join link will be sent to you in email with your webinar registration confirmation. 🗨️ Each call includes an open Q&A discussion section at the end, where you'll have a chance to ask your questions about Microsoft 365. 👋 Was this forwarded to you? Join the Microsoft 365 Champion program today! Champions combine technical acumen with people skills to drive meaningful change. Our community calls are open to everyone, but only Champion program members have access to the presentation resources (access link is in the initial welcome email and in the monthly newsletters). Join now: https://aka.ms/M365Champions. Note: If you are unable to watch the recording on YouTube, try watching it here.Microsoft Excel Beginners Tutorial (2026)
If you’re new to and getting started with Excel or coming from another app, in this video we teach the basics of Excel, the user interface, core concepts, and how to work with basic data. We’ll show you how to build a full Excel workbook from scratch using natural language prompts with Copilot. Format cells, write formulas, and analyze a year of data. Generate sample data, calculate totals, apply conditional formatting, and pin down outliers across columns and rows, all from your browser at excel.new. Share the workbook by name, group, or email and co-author with teammates across web, desktop, and phone. Every edit syncs to OneDrive in real time. Jeremy Chapman, Microsoft 365 Director, shares how to go from blank workbook to analyzed, shared spreadsheet in one sitting. A full data set with only one prompt. Copilot in Excel builds categories, columns, and currency-formatted cells from a natural language prompt. Try it now. Skip the formula syntax. Copilot inserts row and column totals from natural language prompts and exposes the underlying SUM logic so you can verify the math. See how it works. Pull reasoning out of your spreadsheet. Copilot in Excel surfaces the highest- and lowest-cost months and explains the drivers behind each. Try it in Excel. QUICK LINKS: 00:00 — Excel Essentials 00:57 — Start from a blank workbook 02:11 — Core terms and concepts 04:25 — Generate Sample Data with Copilot 06:16 — How to work with the numbers 09:35 — Copilot Writes Your SUM Formulas 09:57 — Conditional Formatting from a Prompt 10:40 — Outlier Analysis with Reasoning 11:36 — Real-Time Co-Authoring in OneDrive 12:22 — Wrap up Link References Check it out at https://microsoft.com/excel Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics? As Microsoft’s official video series for IT, you can watch and share valuable content and demos of current and upcoming tech from the people who build it at Microsoft. Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog Watch or listen from anywhere, subscribe to our podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/podcast Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics Share knowledge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ Enjoy us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ Loosen up with us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics Video Transcript: -Microsoft Excel can help you organize information, perform calculations, and discover patterns in your data all in one place, and you can get to it on your PC, your Mac, your phone, or on the web. I’m Jeremy Chapman, and I’ve been part of the product team responsible for Office at Microsoft since 2012. And today, I’ll walk you through the essentials of Excel and how to use it. So first, if you have a Microsoft account, like outlook.com, OneDrive, or Xbox, or if you use Microsoft 365 at work, you can use Excel on the web, in your browser, and you can get to Excel by navigating to excel.new. And by the way, if you have the Excel app installed, you can open that on your computer or your phone and follow along. When you’re signed into your work or personal Microsoft account, Excel saves your files to OneDrive, so you can easily find them and pull them up on other devices later. -So for today, I’ll keep things simple. So I’ll start with a blank workbook Using Excel on the web. Wherever you use Excel, it’s designed to be a consistent experience on large screen devices, so you can follow along if you’re using the local app on Windows or on a Mac. And Excel is designed to organize any kind of information, numbers, dates, texts, and more. In the main view, you can see that I have columns and rows all ready to enter data. In most cases, there’s a one-time step to create what’s called a workbook in Excel, which I have one open here. Now this is where you’ll use and create a blank workbook, or you can choose from dozens of different templates that are filled in with sample data and formatting to get you started. At that point, you can enter your data, your headers, and start formatting your cells. -Now if you have existing data in a table in another app, you can open it with Excel or just paste in the contents to start working with it. On top, Excel has what’s called the ribbon, with groups of controls presented as tabs that you can use. Within each tab, there are smaller groups of controls, like you can see here with the fonts, alignment, and number. Now let me define a few core names and concepts that you’ll use when you work with Excel in this workbook to manage data. So each field or rectangle that you can see here as I’m highlighting them, these are called cells. Then you have columns, and those are the vertical lines of cells, and those are represented with letters on top. -Next you have rows, and those are the horizontal lines, and those are represented by numbers. For example, the upper left cell is called A1, A for the column name and 1 for the row name. Now a block of multiple connected cells is called a range. So here, for example, I’ve selected range A1 to D4. Right now I’m in a sheet called Sheet1, and you can see in the lower left corner, I can add more sheets, like I’ll do now, and then I can move between multiple sheets and reference data across them as well. But I won’t do that today. -So now I’m going to go ahead and go back to Sheet1. And if you right-click and go to Format Cells, you’ll find options for things like number formats, for example, currency, date, time, and percentage. And on the Home tab, the font group is another place to change these settings, as well as Fill, which lets you change the background color for cells, columns, or rows. I’m going to add some text in this cell as a title for what I want to create today, a monthly expense tracker. Now this text looks like it’s spilling into cell B1, but it’s actually just in cell A1. So I can widen or narrow the columns as much as I want. And if I want this title to span several columns, like in my case, I know that I’m going to need 12 months. So I’ll go ahead and select rows M1 all the way back to A1. Then in the alignment group, I’ll choose the Merge & Center option right here, and that makes my 13 cells into one with the text centered. -So now, in the font group, I can choose the fill color that I want. So in my case, I’ll pick blue. Then for the font color, I’d like to choose something contrasting. So I’ll choose white in my case. And by using these formatting options, you can make things a lot easier to understand as you work with your data. But we still need some content, so let’s add some. So for that, I can use AI with Copilot to generate sample data. So I’m going to go ahead and pull up Copilot and type, “Generate monthly personal finance data for one year with months for columns and expense categories as rows, including sample data. Do not add columns or rows with totals.” -Now I added that last sentence because I want to show you how to calculate totals yourself in a moment. The Copilot is part of Excel on the web and in the desktop and mobile apps if you’re using Microsoft 365 Personal or a work or school account. And you’ll see, once it’s finished, that Copilot generated a Category column and several month columns, as well as multiple rows with different expense types all filled in with the sample data that I asked for. Now notice that it also formatted the row 2 and column A using formatting options that I mentioned before. And each cell in the middle is also formatted as a currency number with a dollar sign. -So I want to add a row here, in my case, for car payment. And you’ll see that it doesn’t match the others yet, and I’ll fix that in a second. Now I’ll add an amount for January, 300. And since this is the same amount every month, I can just select the cell. Then using this square in the lower right corner, I can just drag across the other months, and each, in this case, will have the same number, 300. Let’s fix our formatting. Now, to make the dollar amounts match the cells above, I’ll select this one above my new row, then click on the Format painter, this paintbrush icon here, then I’ll select my new cells. And now they all match. Now I can do the same thing for my Car Payment label in cell A16. -So now I have some formatted data to work with and I can show you how to work with those numbers. I’ll use the Formulas ribbon where you’ll see the most common options to analyze data. For example, if I select all the cells with numbers in column B, then I go up and click on AutoSum, it adds all of the numbers in that column. In fact, now if I click on that cell in the formula bar, I can see a simple formula. Now these start with an equal sign, in my case, SUM as the function itself. Then I have an open parentheses with my range, in my case, B3 to B16, and close parentheses for what I want to calculate. Now that was an example of a very simple formula. Like I did before with the numbers, I can even drag formulas into blank cells. -So I’ll go ahead and grab this one again by the lower right corner square and drag it across all of my columns. So that now has copied the original formula from the B column and duplicated it for each of the other columns. But as I click into each one, notice something that just happened, I have the column letters B all the way through M to each corresponding formula. That makes each sum specific to each of these column months. Likewise, I can select and drag entire columns into blank areas to fill in that data too. And because Excel detected a series of month names in row 2, it even filled in Jan as the new month name for the new cells that I added. Now let’s try another basic formula. For that, I’m going to select all the numbers above the totals row in column B. -Now I’m going to choose Average, and that adds a cell with the average across the entire range that I just selected. So now I want to clean up a few cells. And when you go to delete data, you’ll need to know a few different options. So first, I’ll select the month cells that I just added. And if I just hit the Delete key, it leaves the formatting in those columns, like this blue cell here. This is also called clearing content. I’ll use the Control key + Z simultaneously to bring that content back and undo changes. Now I’m going to go ahead and select the same cells. And when I right-click, you’ll see that there are options to Insert or Delete along with Clear Contents like I just did using the Delete key. -So this time, I’ll choose Delete, and then I have options to delete a column or shift cells left or up. In my case, deleting column N and shifting cells left will clear the contents and formatting. I’ll choose Shift cells left. So now I’ll clear the contents of rows 17 and 18 with my sums and the average to get my content data ready for other ways to analyze it. And there are hundreds of formula options in Excel. In fact, if I expand Financial functions, there are dozens related to accounting and finance. and hovering over each explains how they are used. And in math and trig, for example, there are dozens more that may look familiar if you’ve ever used a scientific calculator. And here I’m just scratching the surface. Those are just a few highlights of the functions that you can use. -But what if you know how to describe what you want but don’t know the function for it? And that’s another area where Copilot helps you get started. So this time, I’ll use Copilot to calculate the totals. I’ll type, “Add a row and column with totals for each month in category.” And Copilot adds the totals by month and even a new column with the totals per category. Copilot will also help with cell formatting. So if I add, “Make the cells you just added with formulas white and bold text in black,” in my prompt, Copilot then reformats those cells too. And you can also add colors to each cell to easily spot differences across these numbers using something called conditional formatting, which is something else that Copilot can help with. I’ll type, “Add conditional formatting in each row to highlight low and high numbers.” -And now we can see where the numbers are the lowest and the highest compared to the others in the same expense category for each month. So you just need to describe what you want and Copilot will do the rest. Now let’s go ahead and move on to deeper analysis of our data. With conditional formatting applied, it’s easier to see each month and how it varies in costs across our different categories. So let’s find some outliers. So I’ll ask Copilot, “What months have the highest expenses and why?” And Copilot analyzes the information and finds the months with the highest expenses. -Then for each, it explains why with the most likely reasons. In this case, December is my highest, and that’s likely due to holiday spending and seasonality. July is the next highest, likely due to air conditioning for utilities costs and the rest of the summer activities that were happening in July. Then August was third highest, also with more travel, AC costs, and dining out. The key insights here summarize what Copilot found with reasoning for increases and decreases along with the lowest months as well. And one more core component that I’ll touch on today is how Excel lets you edit workbooks simultaneously with others. -As I mentioned in the beginning, when you’re using Excel, signed in with a Microsoft account, or using Microsoft 365 at work or at school, it stores your files in OneDrive by default. Now, it also means that when you share an Excel workbook with other people using their name, group, or email, I’ll add Adele here, for example, and hit Send. Then they will be able to open the Excel workbook on their computer or phone and simultaneously edit it with you. And while you co-author with other people as changes are made, like with Adele here, changing the amounts for dining out and entertainment in January, they are saved to the same file. -So those are the basic concepts to navigate Excel, format data, analyze it, and work with others using sharing. And I showed you how Copilot AI can help you as you get started. To learn more, check out microsoft.com/excel. And be sure to subscribe to Microsoft Mechanics for the latest updates, and thanks for watching.Work IQ | Data, Context, Skills & Tools for Copilot and Your Agents
Pull context from SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, email, and meetings — all through Work IQ. Draft Word documents that carry your existing sensitivity labels, and resolve calendar conflicts in Outlook. Run multi-step Copilot Cowork workflows that generate files, schedule meetings, and send status updates from a single prompt. Extend the same knowledge layer to ServiceNow, CRMs, and other non-Microsoft systems with API and MCP Server connectors in the Microsoft 365 admin center, or build your own agents in code against the Work IQ API. Jeremy Chapman, Microsoft 365 Director, shares how data, context, and skills & tools combine into a single grounding layer for Copilot and your custom agents. Skip the manual prompt scaffolding. Work IQ delivers data, context, skills & tools as the built-in knowledge layer behind Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents. See how it grounds every response. Kick off Copilot Cowork with one prompt. Generate a briefing doc, customer presentation, and Excel forecast in parallel. Queue up meeting scheduling and email drafts while it works. See how it runs. Your agent. Your code. Work IQ’s grounding. Integrate Work IQ data, MCP servers, plugins, and skills into custom agents via the Work IQ API. Start here. QUICK LINKS: 00:00 — Work IQ Knowledge Layer 01:32 — Copilot Chat experiences 02:16 — Work IQ in your apps 03:03 — Auto-Applied Sensitivity Labels 04:20 — Copilot Cowork Agentic Workflow 06:11 — Admin Center Connectors 07:21 — Work IQ API for Developers 08:50 — Wrap up Link References Check out the latest updates at https://aka.ms/WorkIQ Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics? As Microsoft’s official video series for IT, you can watch and share valuable content and demos of current and upcoming tech from the people who build it at Microsoft. Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog Watch or listen from anywhere, subscribe to our podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/podcast Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics Share knowledge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ Enjoy us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ Loosen up with us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics Video Transcript: -Imagine AI that understands your individual work context without you having to author long, detailed prompts, manually upload reference content, or query and add business data. That’s what Work IQ is all about. Today, I’ll explain what Work IQ is, how it works, and show you what it can do. So, Work IQ is the brain behind Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents. It’s a built-in knowledge layer that comprises data, with secure access to your unstructured work data across SharePoint, emails, Teams chats and meetings, as well as your structured business data in Dynamics 365 and Power Apps. And you can extend Work IQ data even further to securely interact with external systems using Copilot and Power Platform connectors. -Then context adds semantic understanding of your business data and relationships, like who you work with, work patterns, like projects important to you. This context also includes personalization in Copilot, consisting of the instructions you provide to format its responses, as well as saved memories comprising personal interests and important facts that Copilot retains from chat. -And finally, skills and tools as actions that AI can take with specialized capabilities like generating different files, workflow automation for business processes, scheduling relevant meetings, and more. Together, all of these elements are added to your prompts and subsequent reasoning steps performed to generate more relevant responses and outputs. If you’re using other AI tools today, these are things that you would need to bring in manually, sometimes moving files from policy-protected locations to services without your security controls or visibility, so let me show you a few examples of how this works, starting with a few that use data and context. -So, I’m in Copilot Chat and want to follow up on a recent project discussion, so I’m going to I’ll prompt it, “What did Daichi say about the solar promo timelines earlier this week?” Even though this is a vague statement and could be information in email, Teams, or a recent meeting, Work IQ finds the conversation and its details, then presents those to me. It also finds a related meeting series in my calendar that Daichi scheduled on the topic. And these Work IQ experiences are also available in your apps, like Outlook or other Microsoft 365 apps. -In this case, my calendar is packed with meetings and I’m double-booked in three different time slots. From Outlook, I can ask Copilot to recommend how to resolve conflicts on my calendar for May 12. Copilot, using information from Work IQ, analyzes my schedule, along with my priorities and past meeting patterns. It finds the three timing conflicts on top. Then for each conflict, it reasons over the adjacent meetings, my role, and work patterns to create detailed recommendations for each conflict time. Below that in the summary, it suggests which meetings to reschedule, who to notify, and some actions to take. And Work IQ can help as you write or edit your files in apps like Word. -So, here, I want to to write a summary for a project, and as you can see, there are no project details in this document. It’s just a blank page. So I’ll open Copilot and I’ll prompt it to draft an executive summary about our expansion strategy that highlights our products, the market for outdoor gear, our unique position, and go-to-market strategy. Copilot, together with Work IQ, finds and pulls in data from relevant project files in SharePoint and OneDrive, recent updates from meetings, and relevant emails and Teams conversations. You can see that it automatically applied a sensitivity label based on my existing information protection policies. -Then it generates a detailed summary using all of the data and context that it found, and assembles a fully formatted Word document with specific details about our connected outdoor products, the market opportunity, go-to-market strategy, and our expansion plan with details for carrying it out. As you saw, I didn’t need to author a super long detailed prompt with the project details and have to upload any content or even directly reference files using links. It automatically retrieved relevant content that was aligned with my access permissions as well as my company’s data security policies. -Now let me show you an example using intelligent skills and tools. In this case, I need to prepare for a customer meeting where I need to have several files generated, internal briefing document, a customer presentation, and data insights in a spreadsheet. So, for that, I’ll use Copilot Cowork. I’m going to paste in my prompt where I’m asking it to create those files. Now, I’ll kick off the process. And now it’s using Work IQ data, context, skills, and tools to find relevant data and information and then generate the files I want. -Now, this process can run several minutes, so I’ll speed things up a little to save time. As it works, I can even request more tasks while it’s running using other skills and tools. Here, I ask it to schedule prep time with people on my team and send an email status update to the account team. As it continues working, it checks and finds a mutually open time on our schedules, and it proposes a meeting with participants with all of the details filled in. I can create it right from here. Then it uses another skill to author an email to my contact on the account team that I can even edit right from here. Once everything’s done, you’ll see that it’s created a Zava client presentation, a customer briefing doc, and a customer overview Excel file. I’ll open the briefing document first, and it has everything relevant to the meeting and uses our standard briefing template. -Now, I’ll open the presentation it generated. It explains our work at a glance with key metrics from Work IQ and referenced files, as well as revenue and growth highlights. Now, if I move on to the generated Excel file and open that, it’s laid out year-over-year performance and used that to generate forecasts for this year And you can see the growth trends and more, all from the data it discovered via Work IQ. And like I mentioned, the data can be securely extended to systems from non-Microsoft services using connectors, allowing you to pull in other information like your online CRM systems, content management, databases, ticketing system, and more. -Now, these can be added and configured under Copilot Connectors in the Microsoft 365 admin center. The gallery lets you select from dozens of pre-built connectors or you can create your own. And these can be API-based or MCP server-based. API connections are indexed for read operations and MCP servers are not indexed and support read and write. To add one, like this API-backed connector for ServiceNow Knowledge, you’ll set up the REST API endpoint, provide its namespace and URL to your instance. And since I already have a few MCP server connectors configured, I’ll cancel out of this view and then go to my connections to show you those. Now, here, you can see all of the MCP connections that I have configured in my tenant for things like financial apps, creative suites, collaboration services, and more. -Once connected, these in turn can be accessed via Work IQ by Copilot or your agents. In fact, as a developer, if you are building agents, you can integrate Work IQ into your code with connections using the Work IQ API. Here, I’m using the GitHub CLI. It’s connected to Work IQ and using its underlying MCP servers, plugins, and skills. I have my prompt already entered to find a conversation with Ben and Darrel asking about the availability of an MCP server from the claims team. Now, I want this agent to build another agent based on our discussed feature requests, so I’m going to kick it off. And you can see that it reasons immediately and looks for the conversation to find the features that it needs. -So, after it’s found that, it lists out the features and connects to the insurance claims MCP server and looks at its available tooling. Then it starts to build the scaffolding files for the new agent as JSON and text files. And then deploys a local instance of the agent to test out with a link, so I’ll open that and run a prompt to stack-rank my open claims by age so I can clear the backlog. Then the agent builds a nice claims dashboard with a tiled view of each stack ranked claim. And below that, it even summarizes my priorities so that I can easily focus on what’s important and work through the list. -So, even as you develop new agents or work in other solutions, you can use the data, context, skills, and tools from Work IQ to power those experiences and save time. Work IQ works with Copilot and your agents to deliver personalized, accurate, and grounded outputs based on your real work data, context, and specialized skills and tools. -To learn more, check out the latest updates at aka.ms/WorkIQ. Keep watching Microsoft Mechanics for latest deep dives about AI and what makes it work. And thanks for watching.Microsoft 365 Champion community call | March 2026 | PM
Join our next community call on March 24, 2026, to dive into PowerPoint: creation in Copilot and agent mode. Host: Tiffany Lee Guest: Anubhav Nigam, Khaleel Amarshi Moderator: Jessie Hwang 📢 NOTE: our community call formats are Teams webinars so you must register at https://aka.ms/M365ChampionCallPM to receive the link to join. The join link will be sent to you in email with your webinar registration confirmation. 🗨️ Each call includes an open Q&A discussion section at the end, where you'll have a chance to ask your questions about Microsoft 365. 👋 Was this forwarded to you? Join the Microsoft 365 Champion program today! Champions combine technical acumen with people skills to drive meaningful change. Our community calls are open to everyone, but only Champion program members have access to the presentation resources (access link is in the initial welcome email and in the monthly newsletters). Join now: https://aka.ms/M365Champions. Note: If you are unable to watch the recording on YouTube, try watching it here.
