Microsoft Copilot: 6 Must-Try Features

Key insights

• Interactive Slides (PowerPoint): Copilot builds polished, interactive slides from short prompts so you can move from idea to demo fast.
  Feature is rolling out globally, so it may not appear in every tenant yet.
• Full deck translation (PowerPoint): Copilot can translate an entire presentation into another language while keeping layouts and speaker notes intact.
  Use it to localize slides quickly for different audiences.
• Planner agent: Copilot creates and updates project plans in Planner from chat prompts, turning tasks, dates, and assignments into a live plan.
  It speeds up task setup and hands-off planning work to the team.
• Copilot app Answer cards: The Copilot app now shows quick answer cards for things like weather, sports scores, and finance updates inside chat.
  These cards give fast facts and let you follow up without leaving the conversation.
• Show Changes and History (Excel): Copilot highlights edits, shows version history, and explains what changed in a workbook.
  Use it to review updates, track sources, and speed audits or collaboration reviews.
• Create a new file from another (OneDrive/SharePoint): Copilot helps you make a new document by copying or adapting an existing file stored in OneDrive or SharePoint.
  This boosts reuse and keeps consistent templates and content across your workspace.

Introduction

Mike Tholfsen released a concise tutorial that walks viewers through six recent updates to Microsoft Copilot in September 2026. The video is practical and aimed at people who use Copilot for work, presentations, or data tasks, and it focuses on new tools inside apps such as PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook. In this report, we summarize the video’s key demonstrations, explain what each update does, and discuss tradeoffs and practical challenges for teams that want to adopt these features. Our goal is to present an objective, easy-to-read account for readers who want to decide whether to try the new features.

What the video demonstrates

Tholfsen organizes the tutorial as a step-by-step tour that highlights six features and shows them in action. He demonstrates how each feature changes the workflow, from creating slides to sharing Copilot sessions and using Copilot inside OneDrive and SharePoint. The video includes short, repeatable examples to show real output rather than abstract claims, which helps viewers see how the features behave with real content. Below is a compact timeline of the topics he covers for quick reference.

• 00:00 Introduction
• 00:18 Interactive Slides in PowerPoint
• 05:25 Full deck translation in PowerPoint
• 06:05 Planner agent in Copilot
• 09:56 Answer cards in the Copilot app (Weather, Sports, Finance)
• 10:41 Show Changes and History in Excel
• 11:28 Create a new file from another in OneDrive/SharePoint

Interactive Slides and presentation workflow

The clearest highlight in the tutorial is the new Interactive Slides capability in PowerPoint, which converts ideas into interactive, polished slides. Tholfsen shows how a quick prompt generates slides that include interactive elements, and he notes that the feature is still rolling out globally. This new skill reduces the time needed to build a basic deck, but it also introduces tradeoffs: automated slides save time yet may require closer review for accuracy, tone, and brand compliance. Therefore, teams will need to balance efficiency gains with a review step to ensure outputs align with company standards.

Cross-app updates and collaboration features

Beyond presentations, the video highlights improvements across several apps that aim to improve collaboration and reuse. For example, Copilot session sharing now makes it easier to hand off a chat or continue a conversation with others, and SharePoint skills can be reused across sites and OneDrive, which reduces repeated setup. Additionally, grounding improvements enable Copilot to use structured data from sources like Power BI and images stored in libraries to produce more accurate answers. Yet, these gains create governance and security questions because broader data access means admins must tighten permission and review workflows.

Excel, Planner, and the Copilot app: practical impacts

Tholfsen also tests features that matter for day-to-day productivity, such as showing changes in Excel and a new Planner agent inside Copilot. The Show Changes feature helps users track edits and understand version history more quickly, which improves auditability. The Planner agent can create and adjust tasks based on chat prompts, making project setup faster but forcing teams to decide how much autonomy to grant an AI assistant. Meanwhile, the Copilot app now surfaces answer cards for quick facts like weather and finance, trading deep custom responses for faster, templated results when users only need short answers.

Tradeoffs, challenges, and how to get started

Adopting these features offers clear productivity benefits, yet it requires careful planning to manage tradeoffs between speed and control. Organizations must weigh time saved against the cost of additional review and governance, and they need policies to manage model choice, data grounding, and sharing. Moreover, rollout limitations remain: several features are still in staged release, so teams should pilot features with small groups before a broad deployment to understand integration and permission impacts. To get started, try features in non-sensitive projects, document outcomes, and coordinate IT and compliance teams to set practical guardrails.

Conclusion

Mike Tholfsen’s video provides a useful primer on six Copilot updates that bring interactivity, reuse, and improved grounding to Microsoft 365 workflows. The demonstrations show real examples and highlight both benefits and limits, which helps viewers judge whether the features fit their needs. Overall, these updates push Copilot toward a more integrated, task-oriented role inside apps, but they also demand stronger governance and deliberate rollout plans. For readers interested in testing the new capabilities, start small, review outputs carefully, and involve governance teams early to balance productivity with safety.

Keywords

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