Draft, Analyse and Present with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Almost everyone has now seen a Copilot demo. Very few people have changed how they work because of one. The gap is not enthusiasm and it is not capability. It is that nobody has sat down with them, in their own documents, and shown them where it fits, how to ask for what they want, and how to tell when the answer is wrong.

That is the whole day. You leave with a way of working, not a list of features.

The Microsoft Learn modules behind MS-4018 are free and public, and if you are disciplined you can work through them. What almost nobody does is finish them, because there is no deadline and no one is waiting. What a course gives you is a day where nothing else can interrupt, a trainer who can answer the question the documentation does not, and, more useful than either, examples pointed at the work in front of you rather than at a fictional company.

It also gives you someone to ask three weeks later, when you have hit the thing that makes people quietly give up.

Seven modules and an introduction, delivered in one day. The timings below are Microsoft’s own estimates from the Trainer Preparation Guide, not ours, so you can see exactly where the day goes. Each module ends with knowledge check questions, and each has hands-on Use Case exercises that sit in the Microsoft Learn student content rather than in the slides.

The shape is deliberate. It starts with how Copilot actually works and where its answers come from, because everything afterwards makes more sense once you know that, then moves through Chat and app by app.

This is not a day of watching slides. Three and a half of the day’s hours are spent in eight labs, and they build on each other rather than standing alone, so what you finish with is one working app rather than eight disconnected fragments. That is what makes the skill stick once you are back at your desk.

Online

Live with a real trainer and full class interaction, scheduled regularly, delivered through Microsoft Teams. Same trainer, same exercises and same courseware as the classroom. £249 per person excluding VAT, or three interest-free instalments of £99.60 with Klarna.

In person

Small cohorts at our UK training venues, and the side conversations that make training stick.

Onsite / closed

At your offices, using your own documents, your own data and your own processes as the examples. For this course in particular that is worth a great deal, because the whole point is applying Copilot to your work rather than to a sample file. Microsoft packages the seven module decks individually precisely so a trainer can reweight the day, so if your finance team needs an extra hour on Excel and the Analyst agent and very little PowerPoint, that is what they get. Best value from four people upwards. Ask for a quote.

Self-paced (Launching soon)

On-demand modules to work through at your own pace. Register your interest and we will let you know when it goes live.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is not a cheap add-on, and it is charged per person per month whether or not that person opens it. That is the uncomfortable arithmetic behind almost every Copilot rollout we see: the licences went on the bill in one go, and the usage arrived slowly or not at all. Nobody is doing anything wrong. They simply were not shown where it fits.

The shape of it is always the same. A pilot group gets licences. Two or three of them are naturally curious and get somewhere. The rest try it twice, get a bland answer to a vague question, decide it is overhyped, and go back to working the way they did before. Six months later somebody asks what the return has been, and the honest answer is that most of the seats have barely been touched.

A day of training costs a fraction of what those seats cost over a year, and it is the difference between a licence that sits there and a licence that saves somebody an hour a day. It is worth doing that sum for your own headcount before deciding this is an expense.

There is a second cost that is easier to miss. People who are not taught how to check an answer eventually send one out unchecked. A summary that missed the caveat, a number that was confidently wrong, a tone that was not theirs. Teaching a team where Copilot is reliable and where it needs a human is not a nice-to-have alongside the productivity case. It is most of the point.