Draft a New Message

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this lesson, we're going to take a look at how we can use Copilot in Outlook to
• 00:08 draft a new email message.
• 00:10 So let's set up our scenario.
• 00:12 I've received an email from one of my team members, Harry.
• 00:17 Harry wants to take the day off at very short notice,
• 00:21 now I could reply to Harry but what if I want to create a new email?
• 00:25 Well, we can jump up to the New Email button, we can click on it.
• 00:30 And notice that in the new email we get the draft with Copilot link.
• 00:34 Now we can click on this link to help us write a response to Harry.
• 00:38 It opens up a prompt box and
• 00:40 I'm now going to list out the main things I want to mention.
• 00:44 And when you're typing in your prompts,
• 00:46 it's always best to be as detailed as possible.
• 00:49 So add things like how you're feeling.
• 00:52 So if you're disappointed, then add that into your prompt.
• 00:57 It's also good to provide things like context As well.
• 01:00 All of this helps you get a more meaningful result from Copilot.
• 01:04 So you can see here I'm typing in draft an email to Harry about his very late request
• 01:08 for time off.
• 01:09 Remind Harry that leave needs to be arranged in advance and
• 01:12 added to the leave system.
• 01:15 Needing to run errands is not a valid reason for emergency time off.
• 01:20 And he shouldn't be needing his colleague Olivia to pick up the slack,so
• 01:25 close to the project deadline.
• 01:27 I then want to make sure that I express my disappointment and
• 01:30 let him know that I'm going to be arranging a meeting to discuss further.
• 01:35 And I can see I've got a bit of a typo in there, so let's just jump in and fix.
• 01:39 That looks little better.
• 01:41 Now what I can do is I can click on my generation options and
• 01:45 this is going to allow me to set the tone and the length of the email.
• 01:50 So let's go for formal because this is quite a serious email and
• 01:53 let's make it medium in length.
• 01:56 When we click on Generate,
• 01:57 it's going to go away and generate a draft based on my prompt.
• 02:01 So let's take a look at this.
• 02:02 It says, Hi Harry, I received your request for time off today and
• 02:05 I have to say I'm very disappointed.
• 02:07 You're asking for two days of leave with no notice and
• 02:10 your reason is you have some errands to run.
• 02:12 This is not acceptable, Harry.
• 02:15 It then goes through the rest of the items that we mentioned in the prompt.
• 02:19 And if you read through this, this is actually a really nice professional email.
• 02:24 So I'm pretty happy with what it's generated just here.
• 02:27 Now remember, underneath your draft,
• 02:29 you have that little anything you'd like to change box.
• 02:32 So we could go in and we could choose to change something in this first paragraph.
• 02:36 So maybe instead of two days I wanted to say five days.
• 02:41 Harry's requesting five days of leave at the last moment.
• 02:45 So I'm going to say change two days to five days and
• 02:48 then we're just going to regenerate that draft.
• 02:52 And there we go, it's modified that so it now says five days of leave.
• 02:56 Again, I have both versions.
• 02:59 If I want to go back to the previous one, I can or I can just choose keep it.
• 03:04 And I have to say, I'm pretty pleased with how that email sounds.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.