<aside> ℹ️ Copilot Chat for Busy People. The free one you already have, and it does more than people think. Nine minutes here and you will know what it can and cannot see, five habits worth keeping, six lines to paste, and where it will let you down. No licence needed for any of it.

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The one sentence that explains everything else

Copilot Chat reads the web and whatever you hand it. It does not read your organisation.

It cannot find last quarter's deck. It cannot search your inbox. It has no idea what was decided in Tuesday's meeting unless you put that in front of it yourself. That is not a throttle or a bug. Reaching into your files and mail is precisely what the paid licence adds.

Which means every good Copilot Chat prompt carries its own context. All five habits below are versions of that one idea.

Line by line, what it can and cannot see: What Copilot Chat Actually Sees, free on the site.

What you have, and what you do not

<aside> ✔️ What you have

• AI chat that answers from the internet, included with your Microsoft 365 subscription
• A green shield in the top right. It means what you type stays inside your company's account and is not used to train anything
• File upload, image generation, and Copilot Pages
• Copilot Notebooks, on by default since June 2026, where you park the files and mail that one task keeps needing
• In Teams and Outlook it works on whatever you already have open, so there is nothing to upload in those two
• The same AI models the paid version runs, with a dropdown to pick one and a Think deeper setting. Licence holders get served first when it is busy
• Agents, which you can use and build in the Copilot app. They are billed by the use rather than by the seat, so somebody has to turn the billing on
• Access at m365copilot.com and in the Copilot app, Teams, Outlook and Edge </aside>

<aside> ▪️ What you do not have

• Anything you have not handed it or left open. Nothing reaches into your files, mail or Teams history on its own
• Copilot Search. The search box in the same app is the older one, so it matches your words instead of understanding your question. Two good keywords beat a full sentence in there
• Memory of your last conversation once you start a new one </aside>

Three ways to hand it your work

Microsoft documents three, and most people only know the first one.

• Put it in the prompt. Paste it, upload it with the + button, or type / and pick a file from the list it offers you. How that file picker works.
• Open the thing first. In Teams and Outlook it can see the content you already have open and work on that, so you skip the upload entirely.
• Send an agent. An agent can be pointed at a shared team site, which is the one route that reaches something you did not open yourself. You can build one in the Copilot app, and your company pays for each run rather than a flat monthly seat, so somebody has to turn the billing on first.

Notice that none of the three is a search. You pick what it sees before it answers.

What does your own screen say?

There are two free versions, not one, and the difference decides whether you get Copilot inside Word and Excel at all. Microsoft writes the answer next to your name in the Copilot app and inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Go and look.