10 Microsoft Copilot Prompting Tips For Beginners

Ten Things We Wish We'd Known When We Started Using Microsoft Copilot

Supercharge your prompting with these 10 easy Copilot tips and tricks, and become a prompt engineering brainiac.

1. Learn how to get the most out of Microsoft Copilot quickly with these effective prompt engineering techniques for beginners.
   
   
2. Pick up some best practices and tactics for guiding Copilot towards providing better results and higher quality outcomes.
   
   
3. Discover how to use Copilot to access professional, highly specialised skills.
   
   
4. Save time and get your prompting workflows organised for optimal performance.
   
   
5. Leverage meta prompting to create your own expert prompt engineering 'cookbooks'.
   
   
6. And, troubleshoot Copilot when you're having problems.

Unlock your creative potential with these future-ready Copilot prompt engineering pointers and shorten the gap between ideas and outcomes.

Copilot Prompting Tips and Tricks One-to-Ten

1. Start New Conversations:
   • When Copilot's answers hallucinate, are off-key or steer you wrong, you often get what you want a whole lot quicker by repeating your prompt in a brand new conversation, than you do by trying to redirect Copilot in the original conversation (even when you apply 'Think Deeper', 'Deep Research' or 'Smart GPT' etc.).
     
     
   • Sometimes, Copilot does encounter deeper problems and in such circumstances we recommend a full reset. Log out of your Microsoft 365 account and close Copilot. Open Copilot again, log back in and try again. This often fixes issues which are persistent.
     
     
2. Use Meta Tokens:
   • Whatever your topic, theme, task or objective, search in that niche for secret meta tokens that give you shortcuts to better quality, expertise and more on-message tone, atmosphere, register and specificity.
     
     
3. Make Copilot a Specialist:
   • Don't only tell Copilot what you want, tell it who it is. That could be a published expert on the subject of A, B or C, an award-winning graphic designer specialising in A, B or C, or even a data analysis, statistics and forecasting guru rivalling Martin Armstrong.
     
     
   • You get the idea. And, do notice how quality-focussed these instructions are. This steers Copilot towards more 'high-end' outputs.
     
     
4. Leverage Meta Prompting:
   • Adapt tip Number 3 and tell Copilot that it is a world-class prompt engineer and give it a specialist subject to write killer prompt tokens for you.
     
     
   • Then, select from this array of tokenised data for prompting in Copilot or other more specialist AI tools. There's a working example below (at the end of our tips), which demonstrates how you can quickly create a prompting 'cookbook' for any subject.
     
     
5. Engineer your Prompts for Quality and Accuracy:
   • Don't just write short prompts off-the-cuff. Provide detailed descriptions, then edit them, refine them and make them as comprehensive as you can.
     
     
   • Furthermore, you don't need to learn what a specialist in any given subject does know, but you need to be aware of what subjects they would be fluent in.
     
     
   • So, for instance, to generate a great studio photography image you don't need to learn studio photography, but you do need to know which camera and lens might be used and what different lighting, focus and atmospheric effects might be used (as well as all the possible degrees of realism).
     
     
   • Research your subject from a meta perspective and once you can name the things you want you can get them delivered accurately with a well-engineered prompt.
     
     
   • The caveat here is that for many basic single-step tasks you can get away with a really short prompt (especially if you can also upload an image or share a document for context and reference).
     
     
6. Avoid Politeness:
   • Don't say please or thank you. Countless millions of £s of data processing power have already been wasted, exchanging needless pleasantries with AI assistants.
     
     
   • Copilot can come across as overly-friendly, overly-enthusiastic and even sychophantic, so don't be drawn into that. Copilot is a productivity tool, not a surrogate friend.
     
     
   • And, just because Copilot compliments you or agrees with you doesn't mean what you're doing is necessarily such a good idea. Use your own judgement!
     
     
7. Prompts are Business Assets:
   • Don't let your prompts evaporate into the mists of past Copilot conversations. Your prompts are valuable business assets to be stored, recycled, improved upon, shared with colleagues and colloborated on. Save them in a database, or as a SharePoint list or library perhaps.
     
     
   • A wasted prompt is wasted time and wasted talent.
     
     
   • The same goes for the arrays of tokens you collect from meta prompting.
     
     
   • The way we did it was to compile an AI project directory, with each project folder containing all the assets, outcomes, finished products and the prompts and platforms used to get there.
     
     
8. Copilot Security for Business Users:
   • Whether you are using Copilot 365, Copilot Per User or Copilot Studio, ensure your Microsoft 365 permissions are watertight across the board so that sensitive data doesn't leak into Copilot's frames of reference (known as "over-permissioning").
     
     
9. Human Editing:
   • All Copilot generated content (and all AI content in general) has tells. Make sure to introduce a human element with editing, curating and peer review for anything you publish (whether documents, emails, spreadsheets, presentations, code, image or video media). And, be observant, mindful, vigilant and discerning about the AI generated content you work with.
     
     
   • Common idiosyncrasies in written output, for instance, include Copilot using EM dashes instead of colons and inserting un-needed commas before conjunctions at the end of lists.
     
     
   • However good your prompts, workflows and funnels, without the human touch your media will often feel off-key (and less credible) to your human audience. Copilot is afterall the co-pilot, and not the pilot. Which brings us neatly on to point 10.
     
     
10. Understand your role:
    • With Copilot and other AI assistants performing so many tasks for us, it's easy to forget how crucial our own role is within the process. We are now the storyboard artist, the director, the producer and the editor, and those are the professional skills we should be fine tuning for best results.
      
      

Copilot Meta Prompting in Action

And, to illustrate just how super-charged your Copilot prompting can become with these tips, here's Tip Number 4 (Meta Prompting) in action.

If you've never seen meta prompting output before, this WILL revolutionise your workflows forever and open up a window to a WHOLE NEW UNIVERSE of AI capabilites!

Here's the meta prompt we gave to Copilot:

Copilot's Output:

🦁 Wildlife Photography Meta Tokens

📸 Camera & Lens Simulation

These tokens simulate professional gear and depth of field:

1. - shot on Canon EOS R5, shot on Nikon D850, shot on Sony Alpha 1
2. - 85mm f/1.4 lens, 600mm f/4 telephoto, macro lens, prime lens
3. - DSLR, mirrorless, full-frame sensor, medium format

🧼 Clarity & Detail

Use these to push sharpness and texture:

1. - ultra-sharp focus, tack-sharp details, high-definition, 8K resolution, super-resolution
2. - fine feather texture, detailed fur rendering, micro-detail, crisp edges, noise-free

🌍 Realism & Naturalism

Ground the image in authentic wildlife aesthetics:

1. - National Geographic style, BBC Earth documentary, photojournalistic realism
2. - natural lighting, unfiltered, realistic shadows, true-to-life color grading
3. - wildlife conservation photography, field photography, untouched nature

🌫️ Atmosphere & Mood

Set the emotional tone and environmental context:

1. - golden hour, misty dawn, twilight haze, stormy backdrop, sun-dappled forest
2. - ethereal lighting, dramatic contrast, low-key lighting, backlit silhouette
3. - ambient fog, rain-soaked terrain, dusty savannah, snow-laced tundra

🐾 Subject & Behavior Enhancers

Add specificity and narrative:

1. - predator stalking, mother and cub, mid-flight, feeding moment, territorial display
2. - eye contact with camera, motion blur on wings, leaping through grass, camouflaged in foliage

🎨 Composition & Style

Refine framing and visual storytelling:

1. - rule of thirds, shallow depth of field, bokeh background, center-framed, cinematic crop
2. - portrait orientation, wide-angle landscape, telephoto compression, minimalist composition

🧠 Advanced Tokens (for AI platforms that support them)

These push fidelity and control:

1. - --ar 3:2 (aspect ratio), --v 5 (versioning), --style photographic, --q 2 (quality)
2. - film grain, Kodak Portra 400, Fujifilm Velvia, analog warmth, digital clarity

🧪 Sample Prompt Stack

Notice here how Copilot is steering us here towards creating a prompt library (TIP 7). Such assets will be invaluable as you embark upon your prompt engineering adventures.

We hope you learnt a lot, and get to put these prompting techniques to good use!

If you enjoyed this Copilot prompting article you might also like our:

Copilot Licensing Guide for Excel Users

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Copilot Licensing Guide for Teams and SharePoint (Free download)

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