Join me exploring Microsoft Copilot through each letter of the alphabet. This week, X is for X Marks the Spot. (X is a tricky letter ok?! So I’m going with an extended metaphor…sue me.)

We’re all familiar with pirate stories, right? 

There’s a ship’s crew (likely missing some teeth) sailing to coastline, following a dotted line with an X. They find the X, they’ll dig up the treasure. Easy. 

That is not exactly how it feels to navigate Copilot… 

It’s more like you start with one map, you get a few islands into the journey, and then more islands keep getting scribbled onto the edges while you are already out at sea. Chat. Notebooks. Cowork. Studio. Facilitator. Researcher. Planner Agent. Create.

The ‘map’ can’t keep up with telling you what’s actually on each island or why you’d bother rowing over there. Plus, new crew members keep popping up out of nowhere. (Hopefully brandishing rum…) 

The more useful X isn’t buried treasure, it’s the “you are here” pin, telling you which island you’re meant to be sailing to before you’ve even picked up a shovel.

I’m by no means a cartographer, but having been dabbling in Copilot throughout this series, here’s what I’ve been able to map out so far. 

Let’s extend this nautical metaphor a bit further shall we?

Chat – ok so this one’s not an island, more your ‘dinghy’. Gets you from A to B. Quick, low-effort, fine for most day-to-day questions. 

Notebooks is the island that’s useless until you’ve unpacked a fair bit of cargo onto it first. Give it a curated collection of content and it becomes a brilliant thinking partner and creation engine (see N is for Notebooks).

Cowork is the first mate. Give it an outcome rather than a question and it’ll get on with the work. It can gather information, connect the dots and work through a series of steps that would be too much for one chat. 

Researcher is the scouting party. Give it a decent brief and it’ll disappear over the horizon, gather information from multiple sources and return later with a structured report and the scrolls of evidence to back it up (see R is for Researcher).

Studio is the shipyard. You can go there to build an entirely new vessel. Or, you can take the journeys you already make and turn them into something repeatable, so you don’t have to keep rowing the same route by hand (see S is for Studio).

Facilitator is the ship’s navigator for meetings. It keeps meetings on course against their agenda items, takes notes and captures decisions (see F is for Facilitator).

Planner Agent helps to stop actions floating away. It takes the mess left behind after a meeting and turns it into something that looks suspiciously like a plan. Tasks, buckets and next steps appear surprisingly quickly, although you’ll still need to decide who owns what (see T is for Tasks).

Create is the resident artist. Most of the Copilot archipelago helps you find, analyse or organise information. Create helps you make something new from it, whether that’s a graphic, an image or something visual that gets your point across faster than another paragraph of text. (see C is for Create).

The in-app Copilots in Excel, Outlook, Word and the rest are the specialists, moored exactly where the work already happens.

A simple compass

Every new Copilot capability feels like another island on the map, or addition to the ship’s crew. It’s exciting and overwhelming. Sometimes it makes me feel like I’m bobbing about on a buoy shouting ‘help’! 

Most of us don’t need a bigger map. We need a better compass.

If you’re trying to…	Target island/ crew member
Ask a question	Chat
Get to an outcome	Cowork
Generate specific new material from what you’ve already gathered	Notebooks
Start a deep investigation	Researcher
Make something reusable	Studio
Create something visual	Create

It’s not perfect, but I’ve found it far more useful than trying to memorise feature lists.

Uncharted territory (X marks what’s next)

There are still islands on my map I haven’t landed on yet. In the spirit of an alphabet series running out of letters, here’s what’s currently marked “here be dragons.”

Analyst – rumour has it on this island people speak fluent spreadsheet and can apparently spot patterns without building fifteen pivot tables. I’ll report back once I’ve found it.

Surveys – appears to be inhabited by people who keep stopping passing sailors and asking awkward questions. What I’d like to dig into is the clever stuff it can do with the results. 

Learning Coach – the island I keep sailing past and promising I’ll visit properly one day. From a distance it appears to be full of personalised training, helpful nudges and opportunities for self-improvement. Which sounds suspiciously like exercise. I’m sure it’s good for me.

Full write-ups on all three another day. Consider this the “more digging required” section of the map.

Using the compass

I’ve written before about asking better questions before you even open Copilot (Q is for Questions).

I’m realising I the “What am I trying to achieve?” question gives a big clue to the tool I should be using: 

• Am I asking a question or trying to achieve an outcome?
• Do I already have the context assembled, or do I need Copilot to gather it?
• Is this a one-off task or something I’ll need again next week?
• Does the answer just need to appear in a chat window, or does it need to become part of a process?

None of these are complicated questions.

But I skip them constantly, and I always know within about thirty seconds when I’ve picked the wrong island.

TL;DR

Copilot isn’t one tool. It’s an archipelago with ships and crews, and it keeps growing.

Before you start digging for answers, work out which island you’re actually meant to be on. And if you’re completely new to Copilot? Start with the dinghy. Learn to ask good questions in Chat first.

You’ll quickly discover whether you need a bigger boat.

Which Copilot island do you keep accidentally washing up on when you should have sailed somewhere else entirely? Let me know in the comments.