Cowork Hands-On

Delegate a document-grounded task to Copilot Cowork and have it draft real output in Microsoft 365 on your behalf.

Level 200 45 min Core Learning Path Report an issue

Cowork Hands-On

Delegate real work to Copilot Cowork — hand it a document, let it reason over the content, and have it take action on your behalf while you get on with something else.

Lab Details

Level	Persona	Duration	Purpose
200	Business User	45 minutes	After completing this lab, participants will be able to delegate a document-grounded task to Copilot Cowork, have it draft real output in Microsoft 365 on their behalf, and describe how the delegation loop differs from conversational chat.

Why This Matters
Introduction
Core Concepts Overview
Documentation and Additional Training Links
Prerequisites
Summary of Targets
Use Cases Covered
Instructions by Use Case

Why This Matters

Chat answers you. Cowork does the work.

Everything up to this point in the bootcamp has been conversational — you ask, it responds, you act on the response. Cowork breaks that pattern. You delegate an outcome, it works through the steps, and it hands you back something finished for review.

That shift is the whole point, and it is the one most people miss on first contact. The measure of a Cowork task is not how good the reply reads; it is whether the thing you asked for actually got done.

Introduction

Copilot Cowork takes a delegated task and works it agentically: reading source material, resolving who and what it needs from your organisation, and producing real output in Microsoft 365 — a drafted email, a document, a set of updates — for you to review before anything is sent.

In this lab you hand Cowork the same annual hotel performance report used elsewhere in the bootcamp, ask it to brief a named colleague on the most urgent operational issues, and then verify that a genuine Outlook draft was created.

Core Concepts Overview

Concept	Why it matters
Delegation	You describe an outcome, not a sequence of prompts. Cowork decides the steps.
Agentic action	It produces real artifacts in Microsoft 365 rather than text you then copy somewhere.
Grounding in your content	Uploaded documents and organisational context both feed the work.
Review before send	Output lands as a draft. The human approves — that gate is deliberate.
Running in parallel	A delegated task continues while you do something else; you are not waiting on a reply.
Acting in shared systems	Not every output has a draft stage. A Planner task lands on a colleague’s board the moment it is written.

Documentation and Additional Training Links

Prerequisites

A Microsoft 365 account with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence
Access to Copilot Cowork
Outlook available to the same account, so the drafted email can be verified
Download the sample report PDF: Contoso Grand Hotel Performance Report
For Use Case #2: a sales tracker Excel workbook in a SharePoint document library the account can reach, with columns covering month, region, product line, and sales rep — the reference tenant uses Sales.xlsx in the Sales Lab1b document library — and a colleague named Dewain Robinson who resolves in the tenant directory
For Use Case #3: Planner available to the same account, and the ability to grant Microsoft Graph consent when Cowork prompts for it. Use Case #3 continues the Use Case #2 session, so run them in order

Summary of Targets

In this lab you’ll delegate a real task to Cowork rather than chatting with it. By the end you will be able to:

Upload a complex source document to Cowork and delegate an outcome against it
Have Cowork resolve a recipient from your organisation and draft a real Outlook email
Have Cowork locate a file in SharePoint through Work IQ without being told where it lives
Turn spreadsheet data into an interactive HTML dashboard you can explore in the side panel
Have Cowork attach a graphic from an artifact it built to an Outlook draft
Resume a previous Cowork session and build on the work already in it
Have Cowork create real Planner tasks, and grant the Microsoft Graph consent that requires
Ask Cowork to prioritize its own plan and explain the dependencies between immediate actions
Verify the artifact Cowork produced, and edit it before sending
Explain where Cowork sits against Copilot Chat and a custom agent

Use Cases Covered

Step	Use Case	Value added	Effort
1	Draft an executive email with the Cowork agent from a PDF report	Cowork takes agentic action: reads the PDF, resolves the recipient, and drafts a real Outlook email on your behalf	10 min
2	Build an interactive sales dashboard from SharePoint and draft the summary email	Cowork locates the workbook through Work IQ, extracts the data, builds an interactive HTML dashboard, and drafts an email with a graphic attached	20 min
3	Build a sales campaign in Planner and identify immediate actions	Cowork writes real tasks into Planner with no draft stage, then uses the plan’s context to prioritize the nearest actions and explain their dependencies	15 min

Instructions by Use Case

Use Case #1: Draft an executive email with the Cowork agent from a PDF report

If Researcher (the Researcher exercise in Lab 1) is still reasoning in the background, that’s fine — you can run Cowork in parallel. Switch to Cowork to do something purely conversational agents cannot: agentically read a complex business document, look up the right recipient in your organization, and draft a complete email in Outlook — ready for you to review and send.

Use case	Value added	Estimated effort
Draft an executive email with Cowork	Cowork takes agentic action: reads the PDF, resolves the recipient, and drafts a real Outlook email on your behalf	5 minutes

Summary of tasks

In this section, you’ll upload the same Contoso PDF to the Cowork agent, ask it to draft an email to a specific colleague summarizing the most urgent operational issues, and then verify the draft was created in Outlook.

Scenario: You’re an operations lead at the Contoso Grand Hotel and need to brief your colleague Dewain on the most pressing issues from the annual performance report. Rather than writing the email yourself, you’ll let Cowork extract the key facts from the report and draft the email — addressed to Dewain, ready for you to review, edit, and send.

Objective

Use the Cowork agent to read the same PDF report you uploaded to Researcher, identify five operational issues with root causes and recommendations, and have Cowork draft a real Outlook email to a named recipient (Dewain Robinson).

Step-by-step instructions

Open the Cowork agent

From the same Microsoft 365 Copilot page (https://m365.cloud.microsoft/chat/?auth=2&home=1), select Cowork on the Chat / Cowork toggle at the top of the Copilot panel.

Take a moment to orient before you type anything. The message input reads Start a task…, not “ask me anything” — and that wording is the distinction this whole lab is about: you are handing over an outcome, not opening a conversation. In the left rail, My tasks is where delegated work appears while it runs, Automations is for work you want to recur, and below those Cowork lists your previous sessions — you’ll come back to that list in Use Case #3.

[!TIP] Cowork is generally available in Microsoft 365 Copilot and is purpose-built for agentic action-taking: it can read documents, look up people in your tenant, and create real Outlook drafts / Word docs / Teams messages on your behalf. While Researcher excels at deep analysis and Analyst at data and computation, Cowork excels at completing multi-step tasks that span several Microsoft 365 surfaces.

Upload the report and ask Cowork to draft an email

Click Add attachments (the paperclip icon next to the message input), then choose Upload images and files (PDF, Word, Excel, images). Select the Contoso_Grand_Hotel_Performance_Report.pdf file you downloaded for the Researcher exercise in Lab 1.
Wait for the upload to complete — the PDF will appear as a chip above the message input.

[!TIP] Uploading is not the only way to give Cowork a file. While editing a prompt, press # to pick one straight from OneDrive — and in Use Case #2 you’ll use a third route, where Cowork finds the file itself and you never name a location at all.

Paste the following prompt into the message input and press Send:

 Create a draft email in my Outlook mailbox addressed to Dewain Robinson summarizing the five most urgent operational issues from the attached hotel performance report. Use the Outlook draft tool — do not just write the email text in chat.

 For each issue, include in one short bullet: the symptom, the root cause, the estimated financial impact, and the matching recommendation (Section 16 R-number).

 Address the email "Hi Dewain," and sign it from "The Operations Team". Keep the total email under 400 words. Use the PDF as the only source.

[!TIP] Cowork executes this as a multi-step task: (1) reads the attached PDF, (2) looks up “Dewain Robinson” through Work IQ, (3) drafts a new email in your Outlook mailbox, (4) reports back in chat when done. Unlike Researcher, Cowork rarely asks clarifying questions — when the prompt is clear, it just acts, and typically completes in ~2–3 minutes.

Observe how the Cowork agent:
- Streams execution updates (e.g., “Reading PDF”, “Searching for Dewain Robinson”, “Drafting email in Outlook”)
- Confirms the recipient resolved correctly (e.g., “Drafted email to Dewain Robinson”)
- Reports back inline in chat with a summary of the email it created and ends with “Open it in Outlook to review, edit, or send”

Verify the draft in Outlook

Open the app launcher (the 3×3 dot “waffle” icon at the top-left of the page) and select Outlook. Outlook opens in a new browser tab.

[!IMPORTANT] On your first Outlook visit, a “Your privacy matters” prompt may appear — click Continue to dismiss it. After that, the Outlook UI is ready for use.
In the Outlook left rail, click the Drafts folder. Find the email Cowork just created at the top of the list — the subject will mention the Contoso Grand Hotel performance report and the urgent operational issues (Cowork phrases the subject conversationally, so the exact wording varies). Click it to open.
Review the draft:
- Recipient: Dewain Robinson (resolved as a contact pill — hover or click the pill to see the SMTP address)
- Subject: mentions the Contoso Grand Hotel report and the urgent operational issues (Cowork-generated wording — exact text varies)
- Body: five bullets, each covering symptom + root cause + financial impact + recommendation R-number
- Sign-off: “Best regards, The Operations Team”
- Total: approximately 300–400 words
From here you can edit, send, or delete the draft as you would any other Outlook email. For this lab, leave it as a draft (or delete it) — no need to actually send.

[!TIP] Cowork appends a Sent by Copilot Cowork footer to drafts it creates. You can remove that line before sending if you prefer a clean signature.

[!TIP] By now, head back to the Researcher exercise in Lab 1 and check whether Researcher has finished. If it has, compare the two outputs side-by-side: Researcher gives you a deep analytical breakdown, Cowork gives you an actionable email ready to send. Each is the right tool for a different job.

Congratulations! You’ve used Cowork to draft an executive email from a PDF report!

Test your understanding

Key takeaways:

Cowork takes agentic action — It doesn’t just summarize. It reads a document, resolves a person in your org, and creates real artifacts (an Outlook draft, a Word doc, a Teams message) that are ready for you to review.
No clarifying-question round-trip — When the prompt is clear and directive (“Draft an email to X about Y, address as Z, sign as W”), Cowork proceeds without asking follow-ups. The cost of being specific is a faster, more deterministic result.
Cross-app integration — The result lives in Outlook, not in the chat. Cowork pivots the M365 experience from “answer in chat” to “complete the task in the right app”.
Parallel work pays off — Cowork is a great companion to Researcher: while Researcher reasons in the background, Cowork drafts a real artifact you can ship in a fraction of the time.

Challenge: Apply this to your own use case

What weekly emails do you draft from the same source data? Could Cowork generate the first draft?
Which Microsoft 365 documents would you ask Cowork to read — project status reports, meeting notes, customer feedback summaries?
Beyond email, Cowork can draft Word documents and Teams messages — what scenarios in your work would benefit from that kind of agentic drafting?

Use Case #2: Build an interactive sales dashboard from SharePoint and draft the summary email

Use Case #1 handed Cowork a file you uploaded and asked for one artifact. This one gives it neither. You don’t say where the file is, and a single instruction has to carry Cowork across four surfaces — find, extract, build, draft.

Use case	Value added	Estimated effort
Build a sales dashboard and draft the summary email	Cowork locates the workbook through Work IQ, extracts the data, builds an interactive HTML dashboard, and drafts an email with a graphic attached	10 minutes

Summary of tasks

In this section, you’ll give Cowork one instruction that spans four surfaces: it locates a sales tracker workbook in SharePoint using Work IQ, extracts the data, builds an interactive HTML dashboard, and drafts an Outlook email to a named colleague with a chart from that dashboard attached.

Scenario: You’re a sales operations analyst. The sales tracker lives somewhere in SharePoint, and Dewain Robinson needs a readable summary with a sales visual he can preview without opening and interpreting the source workbook. Rather than building the charts yourself and assembling the email in Outlook, you’ll delegate the whole chain in one prompt and watch Cowork work through it.