Prompts that work in Microsoft 365 Copilot, with New Zealand business examples

Why the same question gets a better answer from one person than another

Put two staff in front of Microsoft 365 Copilot with the same task and you often get two very different results. One types 'summarise the Henderson job' and gets a vague paragraph. The other names the file, says who the summary is for, asks for five bullet points and a list of open risks, and gets something they can paste into an email. The tool is identical. The instruction is not.

Microsoft describes a prompt as having up to four parts: the goal, the context, the expectations and the source¹. Only the goal is required. The other three are what turn a generic reply into one that fits your business¹. For most owners and managers, the fastest gain is rarely a clever trick. It is getting people to add the missing context and to name the source document every time.

There is a second reason prompts matter in Copilot specifically. A licensed Microsoft 365 Copilot user gets answers grounded in their emails, chats, meetings and files, limited to content they already have permission to view⁵. That is powerful, but it also means a loose prompt can pull in an old draft, a superseded price list or a thread from the wrong client. A precise prompt keeps Copilot looking in the right place. Microsoft has also renamed the product to Microsoft Copilot, dropping the Microsoft 365 prefix, and the prompt advice here applies under either name⁵.

The four parts, written for a New Zealand workplace

Treat each part as a question you answer before you press Enter. You do not need all four for a quick lookup, but for anything that will leave the building, write them out.

Here is the difference in practice. A weak prompt from a small Christchurch engineering consultancy might be 'write a proposal for the council job'. A stronger version reads: 'Draft the methodology section of a proposal for a stormwater upgrade tender. The client is a district council and the evaluators score methodology and health and safety separately. Use a formal but plain tone, no more than one page, with headings for site investigation, design and construction support. Base it on /Stormwater methodology template and /Tender clarifications. Flag any requirement in the clarifications that the template does not cover.' The second prompt answers all four questions, and it asks Copilot to show its gaps rather than hide them.

• Goal: start with a plain verb such as draft, summarise, compare, list, check or rewrite, and say what the output is for¹.
• Context: who will read it, why you are asking, and any New Zealand detail that changes the answer, such as GST-inclusive pricing, a council client or a union-covered workforce.
• Expectations: length, format, tone and structure, for example 'a table with three columns' or 'one short paragraph, plain English, no jargon'¹.
• Source: the files, emails, meetings or people Copilot should rely on, named explicitly rather than left for Copilot to guess¹.

Point Copilot at the right files with the slash menu

In Copilot Chat and in the Microsoft 365 apps, typing a forward slash opens a picker for people, files, meetings and emails, and you select the item you want Copilot to use⁶. This is the single most useful habit to teach, because it replaces 'the latest version' with a specific document. Copilot ranks suggestions by relevance, so a file you worked on this morning usually appears first⁶.

Two cautions apply. When you attach a file from your own device rather than from OneDrive or SharePoint, Microsoft saves a copy to your OneDrive⁶. That is fine for a supplier price list. It is not where you want a stray spreadsheet of staff medical certificates to end up, so decide which files are never uploaded. Second, Copilot only respects the permissions you already have⁵. If a person can open a folder they should not, Copilot can read it for them too. The permissions checks in our guide to checking permissions before a Copilot rollout should come before any prompt training.

For longer pieces of work, Copilot Notebooks let you collect files, pages, links and earlier chats in one place and ask questions against that set⁷. A notebook suits a project that runs for weeks, such as a building fit-out or an annual review of insurance cover, because you stop re-attaching the same six documents to every prompt.

Worked prompts from New Zealand businesses

The examples below are generic composites of tasks we see in training, not real clients. Change the names in slashes to your own files. Each one is written so that a reviewer can check the output against the source.

Read each prompt for its structure rather than its wording. Every one names a reader, limits the length or format, and tells Copilot what to do when the source is silent. That last instruction is the habit that stops Copilot inventing a figure to fill a gap.

• Outlook, a Tauranga freight forwarder: 'Summarise this thread with the shipping line about the delayed container. List what each party has promised and by when, then draft a short reply to our customer in Rotorua that explains the delay without blaming the line. Do not quote any new arrival date that is not in the thread.'
• Teams, a Wellington policy consultancy: 'From /Monday project meeting, list the decisions made, the actions with owners, and any question that was raised but not answered. Put it in a table I can paste into the project channel.'
• Excel, a Hamilton retailer with three stores: 'Using the sales table in this workbook, compare gross margin by store and by product category for the last two quarters. Show the result as a table, then tell me which two categories moved most and what formula you used.'
• Word, a Nelson accommodation business: 'Rewrite /Cancellation policy for guests in plain English at a reading age a teenager would manage. Keep every condition and dollar figure exactly as it is. Then list any sentence you changed in meaning, so I can check it.'
• PowerPoint, a Palmerston North manufacturer: 'Build a ten-slide board update from /Q2 operations report. One slide each for safety, output, quality, people and capital projects. Use the numbers from the report only, and add a final slide called Questions for the board.'
• Copilot Chat with web grounding, any owner: 'Explain in plain terms what an employer has to do before agreeing a flexible working request in New Zealand, and link to the official sources you used.' Then open the links and read them yourself before relying on the answer.

Prompts that ask Copilot to check itself

Generative tools can produce confident, fluent text that is wrong. The National Cyber Security Centre calls these hallucinations, where a response sounds correct but is not true, and it also warns that AI systems can be manipulated through prompt injection hidden in content they read⁹. You cannot prompt your way out of that risk entirely, but you can make errors easier to spot.

Ask for evidence alongside the answer. Phrases such as 'quote the sentence from the source that supports each point', 'say not found in the source if the file does not answer this' and 'list anything you assumed' change what comes back. Microsoft 365 Copilot shows citations to the information it used, and those citations are kept with the response in the user's activity history⁵. Teach staff to click them. A citation that points at last year's version of a policy is a quick catch.

Then put a person in the loop. The Privacy Commissioner expects agencies to have a human review generative AI output before acting on it, because of the risk of acting on inaccurate or biased information⁸. MBIE's voluntary guidance for businesses makes the same point in commercial terms, listing risks to privacy, workplace culture and physical safety among others that a firm should consider when it uses AI¹⁰. A prompt can save the first draft. It cannot sign off the last one.

• Add 'If the source does not say, write not stated' to any prompt that extracts facts.
• Ask Copilot to list its assumptions as a separate section at the end.
• For numbers, ask which cells or paragraphs each figure came from, then spot-check two of them.
• Never forward Copilot's draft to a client, regulator or employee without reading it in full.

What not to put in a prompt

Microsoft states that prompts, responses and data accessed through Microsoft Graph are not used to train the foundation models behind Microsoft 365 Copilot⁵. That is a useful assurance, but it is not a licence to paste anything anywhere. Copilot Chat can send a search query to Bing when web grounding is on, built from terms in your prompt⁵. Microsoft also notes that customers outside the EU may have queries processed in the US, the EU or other regions⁵. For a New Zealand firm, that is an overseas-disclosure question worth answering once, in policy, rather than prompt by prompt.

The NCSC's advice for small businesses is to set an internal AI use policy and to define clearly what data cannot be uploaded into AI tools⁹. The Privacy Commissioner goes further for personal information: do not put personal or confidential information into a generative AI tool unless you have confirmed it is not retained or disclosed by the provider⁸. In practice, the most useful version is a short list that staff can remember without looking it up.

• Bank account numbers, IRD numbers and passport details belong in your systems, not in a prompt.
• Health information about staff or customers stays out unless your privacy officer has approved the use.
• Pasting a whole client file into a web-grounded chat is a no. Reference the file with the slash menu inside your tenant instead.
• Passwords, API keys and system credentials never go into any AI tool.

Save, share and schedule the prompts that work

A good prompt is a small piece of business process, so keep it. Prompt Gallery holds Microsoft's suggested prompts, the prompts each person saves under Your prompts, and prompts shared with a team². To share one, open Your prompts, hover over the card, choose Share prompt and pick the Microsoft Teams team you want³. Shared prompts stay inside your organisation³, and Microsoft states the saved and shared prompt collections are stored within the tenant boundary².

Scheduled prompts take this one step further. A licensed user can set Copilot to run a prompt at a set time and frequency, with the result arriving in Teams, Outlook or Copilot Chat⁴. A Monday-morning prompt that summarises unanswered customer emails from the previous week is a typical first use. Admins should know the feature depends on the connected experiences setting (Allow the use of connected experiences in Office), and that turning it off also switches off other Microsoft 365 features⁴.

Start small. Ask each team to agree on three prompts for their most repeated tasks, test them for a fortnight, then share the winners to the team. That gives you a prompt library based on real work rather than a list copied from the internet.

• Week one: each person saves two prompts they actually reused.
• Week two: the team picks the best version of each and shares it to the team in Prompt Gallery.
• Month two: the manager reviews which shared prompts are still used and retires the rest.