So, what makes Cowork so much better than Chat? It all comes down to creation capabilities. Previously, I would start a chat with Copilot and we would get to a point where I wanted it to go ahead and create a Word document for me. It couldn’t do it, so it would just type out a bunch of stuff and say, “Copy and paste this into Word and you’re all set.” Sometimes, I could trick Chat into making a file, but it would be empty or produce a link to nowhere for me to download it. Now, with Cowork, it has no issues creating documents, spreadsheets, presentations, or PDFs. And it can do it all in one place. No more switching agents to get Excel stuff done, it’s all in one place now.

What’s this look like in real life though? I’ve recently been preparing for a strategic planning session with my team. I had been running through a bunch of spreadsheets, reports, etc, looking at our performance so far this year compared to last year. Throwing them all into Chat created some really good insights, but until Cowork stepped in, there was no way to get them out of Chat and into a place for me to share with my teammates. I ended up using a single prompt to get a summary from Chat, pasted it into Cowork, and then asked it for whatever it thought I needed for the meeting. It went to work, preparing a 10-slide PowerPoint presentation, and one-page Word summary, and even a KPI dashboard image. And since I had uploaded my brand guide, it did it all in our colors, looking very Nordic.

Next up, I’ll be re-running some of our reports to get more granular data for Cowork to do its thing and starting fresh in there. I’ll be exporting quarterly reports for the past 2+ years, some 40+ reports, tossing it all at Cowork, and then letting it run wild to see what it comes up with. This is one of those things that would have taken me days to get organized, and it’s just never really been possible. But with this new tool, the number of reports isn’t scary anymore.

One of my teammates has also been playing in Cowork. We have a scheduling tool that could be better, so he took a screenshot of it and sent it in, asking Cowork to make a new version that did some things differently. In 15 minutes, he had a working MVP of a new app. A couple of iterations later, he had a dark mode toggle, drag and drop functionality, and much more. We have been talking about maybe coding up a new version that did just what we wanted it to do for over a year now, but it was such a daunting task, we kept putting it on the back burner. With Cowork, realizing that goal is within reach.

The only thing I wish I could do that I can’t is give Cowork access to more of my data. I asked it if there were a way to get a Dataverse connection setup, and it can’t quite do that yet. But I’m sure that’s coming soon, it’s just a matter of time. Meanwhile, I’m going to be seeing what else I can do with Cowork. It’s a real next-level agent.

-Nate