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About this lesson
Use Copilot to draft a new message from scratch.
Exercise files
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5.02 draft-a-new-message - Exercise.docx53.1 KB 5.02 draft-a-new-message - Exercise solution.docx
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Quick reference
Draft a New Message
Use Copilot to draft a new email message.
When to use
We can use Copilot whenever we need some help drafting an email message.
Instructions
- Click New mail or press CTRL+N to create a new message.
- Click the Draft with Copilot link in the body of the message.
- Type the prompt: 'Draft an email to Harry about his very late request for time off. Remind Harry that leave needs to be arranged in advance and added to the leave system. Needing to run errands is not a valid reason for emergency time off and he should not leave Olivia to pick up the slack so close to the project deadline. Express your disappointment and let him know you will be arranging a meeting to discuss.'
- Click Generation options.
- Change the tone to Formal.
- Change the length to Medium.
- Click Generate.
We can make any further changes by typing them into the prompt area.
- Click Keep it.
- 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.
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