Phase 2 · Microsoft Copilot · Level 2 · Practitioner
Microsoft Copilot: Practitioner Quiz · 10 min
Why it matters A quick check of your judgement before you move on. There's no penalty for a low score, and you can retake it, or take it first to test out of a level you already know.
These are the judgement calls you'll face using Copilot inside the actual apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams) plus the newer surfaces and agents. They're scenarios, not trivia: pick the best option, and you'll get an explanation after each one.
Passing this checkpoint: work through the level first, then score 70% or more here.
Skipping this level: already confident? Take this cold and score 80% or more to test out and jump ahead. Below that, nothing is lost, you just study the level as normal.
1. You open Word to draft a report and there's no Copilot button on the ribbon, though a colleague at another company has one. What's the most likely explanation? Your Word installation is corrupted and needs reinstalling. Copilot in Word is a paid Microsoft 365 Copilot feature; no button almost always means your account doesn't have the licence, not that anything is broken. You need to restart Word a few times for the button to appear. Copilot only works in the web version of Word, never the desktop app. 2. In Excel you paste a messy range (blank rows, merged cells, inconsistent columns) and ask Copilot to analyse it. The answers are vague and a bit wrong. What's the first fix? Ask the same question again, more forcefully. Format the data as a proper Excel table (single header row, one record per row, no blanks or merges) so Copilot has clean structure to reason over, then re-ask. Give up, Copilot can't analyse spreadsheets. Switch to the free Copilot chat, which handles Excel data better. 3. Using Edit with Copilot in Word, you ask it to restructure a document and it produces a batch of changes. You're in a hurry. What's the wise move? Accept all the changes at once, because Edit with Copilot works in the real document, so it must be right. Read the changes (they appear as tracked edits) and accept or reject each, because Copilot can make a subtle error that's easy to miss in a bulk accept. Reject everything, agent-style editing can't be trusted at all. Ask Copilot 'did you make any mistakes?' and accept all if it says no. 4. You want to build a slide deck from your team's quarterly figures, which live in an Excel workbook. You try 'Create presentation from file' in PowerPoint but your spreadsheet isn't a valid choice. Why? Copilot in PowerPoint is broken for your account. Create-a-presentation-from-a-file generally works from a Word document or PDF, not a spreadsheet, so summarise the figures into a document first, then generate the deck from that. You can never make slides about data with Copilot. Spreadsheets are too large for Copilot to ever read. 5. You join a Teams meeting late and afterwards ask Copilot for a recap with action items. It says there's nothing to summarise. What most likely happened? Copilot doesn't do recaps in Teams. The meeting probably wasn't recorded or transcribed; the after-the-fact recap generally needs a recording or transcript to exist as its source. Recaps only work if you were on time for the meeting. You need to ask in a different language. 6. In Outlook you ask Copilot to 'create a rule that deletes all newsletters', and it shows you a summary of the rule and asks you to confirm. Why does it pause there, and what should you do? It's just a loading delay, so click confirm without reading. A rule is standing configuration that keeps acting on future mail, so Copilot previews it for confirmation; read the summary carefully to make sure it won't delete something you actually want before you enable it. The pause means the rule failed; try again. It always deletes the mail first and asks afterwards, so the confirmation is pointless. 7. You're moving Fernway's sales analysis from Excel into a Word report. In Excel, Copilot's 'strongest region' claim was based on figures that still included a total showing £49 where it should be £490. What's the risk, and the fix? No risk, once it's in Word, Copilot will recheck the numbers automatically. A wrong number that leaves Excel becomes a wrong number in the report; verify and correct the figures before the handover, and draft the report from your verified findings rather than the raw sheet. Just tell Word's Copilot to fix any errors in the report after it's written. The error doesn't matter because reports are only summaries. 8. You've got a great Copilot answer that you and two colleagues now need to develop together over the next few days. Where should it live? Leave it in the chat and each person re-asks Copilot separately. Move it to a Copilot Page, an editable, shareable canvas, so the three of you can refine it together, rather than losing it in an ephemeral chat. Email screenshots of the chat back and forth. Put it in a Notebook, because Notebooks are the only way to share anything. 9. A colleague insists 'Copilot only ever uses OpenAI's models, so there's no point looking for anything else.' Based on this level, what's the accurate reply? They're right, Copilot is OpenAI-only, always. Not quite: in several experiences (like Edit with Copilot in the Office apps and the Researcher agent) you can choose the model, including a Claude model from Anthropic; in the UK, Claude may be off until an admin enables it. Copilot never lets you choose a model under any circumstances. You can only choose models in the free consumer chat, never at work. 10. The Researcher agent returns a polished, well-structured report with citations answering your question about industry best practice. What's the right level of trust? Full trust, it's structured and cited, so it must be accurate. Use it as a strong starting point, but follow the citations for anything a decision rests on, because a cited source can be misread and a confident conclusion can still be wrong. No trust, agent reports are always fabricated. Trust it only if it's longer than two pages. Answered 0 of 10.
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