If your team uses Microsoft 365 Copilot and the summaries feel vague, here is the single biggest fix. Add an anchor to every prompt.

An anchor is a name, a project, a topic or a keyword. Something specific that tells Copilot where to look.

Weak vs strong

Weak: "Summarise my emails from the last five days."

Strong: "Summarise emails from Sarah and the finance team about the Q3 budget review from this week."

The weak prompt asks Copilot to decide what matters across your entire inbox. It guesses. Sometimes well, often not. The strong prompt tells it exactly where to look, and the answer gets dramatically better for no extra effort.

Why anchors work

Copilot searches across your Microsoft 365 data — emails, documents, chats, meetings. Without an anchor, it has to decide which of those thousands of items are relevant to your question. The more specific you are, the smaller the search space, and the sharper the result.

Think of it like asking a colleague. "What happened last week?" gets you a ramble. "What did the client say about the delivery timeline in Thursday’s call?" gets you an answer.

More examples

In Teams: Instead of "What was discussed in yesterday’s meeting?", try "What did the product team decide about the launch date in yesterday’s standup?"

In Word: Instead of "Summarise this document", try "Pull out the three recommendations from the risk assessment section."

In Excel: Instead of "Analyse this data", try "Compare Q1 and Q2 revenue for the Northern region and flag any month where growth was below 5%."

The challenge

Try it on your next three Copilot prompts. People, projects, topics, timeframes. Any one of them counts as an anchor. The more anchors, the sharper the result.

One habit, thirty seconds, better output on every prompt you write.