How we’re using Microsoft 365 to reduce merchant QBR prep from hours to minutes
Hi Champions, I wanted to share a practical adoption pattern we have been working on for account teams that prepare recurring customer or merchant business reviews. One workflow we kept seeing was quarterly business review prep: an account manager starts with a CSV or TSV export, then manually rebuilds similar scorecards, summaries, PowerPoint slides, and follow-up notes for many accounts. It is important work, but a lot of the prep is repetitive. We built https://marketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/product/WA200010195as a Microsoft 365 agent to explore how much of that workflow can stay inside the tools business users already use. The current workflow is: - Start from a merchant performance export in CSV or TSV format, either from OneDrive or pasted directly in chat. - Generate executive QBR scorecards for one merchant or multiple merchant accounts in a batch. - Include payments-oriented metrics such as transaction volume, authorization rate, top decline reason, chargeback rate, interchange downgrade, and loyalty spend lift. - Create a PowerPoint scorecard for each account. - Organize the run in OneDrive with an index, per-account status, and an optional ZIP bundle. - Draft a follow-up email that the user can review and send from Outlook. The adoption lesson for us has been that Copilot and agents land best when the workflow is narrow, familiar, and already painful. “Prepare this quarter’s account reviews from the export I already have” is much easier for business users to understand than a broad AI promise. I would be interested to hear how other Champions are approaching similar recurring review workflows. Are your teams using Microsoft 365 Copilot or agents for business-review prep, customer success workflows, sales/account planning, or operational reporting? For anyone curious, the app is listed on Microsoft Marketplace here: https://marketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/product/WA200010195.
Excel Copilot now supports local files (Preview): what this means for everyday users
In the Microsoft 365 Current Channel (Preview), Excel Copilot Chat now supports local Excel files, not just workbooks stored in the cloud. This is a meaningful usability improvement because many users, especially students and early-career professionals, still work primarily with datasets stored locally on their devices. Why this matters for adoption: Users can now interact with Copilot Chat while analysing local Excel files. This reduces friction for offline work, assignments, and exploratory data analysis. It makes Copilot more practical for everyday learning and productivity workflows. For users learning data analysis, reporting, or business intelligence, this update lowers the barrier to using Copilot consistently rather than only in cloud-based scenarios. I am exploring how these preview features can improve real-world adoption and learning experiences, particularly for students and early-career users who work with Excel daily.How to view all employees in Microsoft Places?
Now that the Favorites feature has been removed and Microsoft Places only shows frequently used people from Microsoft 365 apps, is there a way to see all employees of the company (65 people) in one overview? I’m looking for a way to search this list and ideally sort it alphabetically or by department. Is this functionality planned to return, or is there an alternative way to achieve this today?
CPAi Advisors + Copilot Frontier: Accounting Meets Agent Mode
Hey all — I’m Dan, founder of CPAi Advisors, where boutique accounting meets workflow automation and Microsoft Copilot. I spent years in public company accounting, working across GL, AP/AR, reporting, and compliance — plus deep ERP integrations and technical troubleshooting. After seeing firsthand how manual and fragmented financial workflows can be, I decided to go out on my own and build something smarter: a boutique firm powered by Microsoft 365 Business Premium + Copilot. Now I’m exploring how Office Agent (Frontier) can take things further — not just chat in Word or Excel, but actually carry context across apps and orchestrate real accounting tasks. Here’s what I’m testing: Agent Mode in Excel → financial models, ledger reconciliation, anomaly detection Agent Mode in Word → client-ready reports that pull live spreadsheet data Agent Mode in Outlook → turning email threads into task lists and audit prep Cross-app orchestration → one prompt that builds a report, updates the spreadsheet, and drafts the email 💡 Focus: Copilot in accounting workflows Automating compliance & audit readiness Bridging trust in AI for financial advisory Pushing Agent Mode beyond the obvious Excited to share feedback and help shape what’s next. Let’s make accounting workflows smarter — and a little more fun. Take care & be well!
M365 Roadmap Management
Wondering if others have tips & tricks on how they stay up to date with the https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap? I find it tedious to stay on top of all the features being announced, switching launch phases, moving target dates, and so on. I was hoping to use the RSS feed in a PowerBI Dashboard or find a solution in Planner similar to syncing the Admin Centre messages, and after some quick searches online could not find an example of anyone doing something similar. I was hoping any members of this community may be able to shed some light on how they approach the roadmap site and what tools if any they use to manage the constant influx of information? TIA!
Tips/resources on managing Shared Mailboxes in New Outlook?
Hello In the New Outlook Shared categories are no longer available on a Shared mailbox. At each and every client I have they rely quite heavily on shared mailboxes for client interactions. Shared categories are used to distribute work in the team and reach consensus on who follows up. This is no longer working in the New Outlook. This makes centralized external communications via Outlook impossible. For small organisations, other software used by corporates is often seen as overkill. Teams is not an option given the fact that there are known external users and unkown users that you want to enable to reach the organisation in a simple and friendly way (Forms are not seen as customer friendly, nor Chatbots) What solutions would you suggest?Suggestions for low cost online Card Sort tool?
Looking for suggestions for a low-cost online card sorting tool. I'm sure we can all agree that the correct IA is key for good usability and adoption. We're going to re-do our navigation to better serve our users and looking for a card sort tool that we can use to gather data on how to best organize.Tool for training needs analysis
I'm not sure if I'm in the right place to ask this... Part of my role is to drive adoption of O365 in our customer's organisations. I'm looking for a cloud-based tool to assess who needs training, which aspects of the suite they need training in and possibly even how best they like to learn (instructor-led, video, self-paced etc). Ideally the tool would give me a good idea of the digital literacy of each employee and where their strengths and weaknesses lie with each app (e.g Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, SharePoint etc). Any help with this from the community would be greatly appreciated!
