Tutorials

Copilot Cowork can be extended with plugins, and a plugin is just a .zip file containing a manifest, icons, skills and optional connectors (remote MCP servers). I wanted to see how quickly I could wrap Higgsfield (AI image, video and audio generation) as a Cowork plugin and publish it to my tenant. In this post I’ll show you the package, the two skills I wrote, the admin centre upload click by click, and then a real run: one photo of me turned into a stage image and then a short video, all from Cowork. ...

A Copilot demo is only as good as the data it has to work with. I wanted to demonstrate a scheduled prompt that reviews the previous seven days of email, identifies anything urgent, extracts actions and lessons learned, and prepares a Monday morning update for a team. There was one fairly obvious problem: I needed a mailbox full of realistic emails first. Rather than manually creating 30 messages, changing their dates and trying to remember which ones should be unread or important, I built a reusable PowerShell utility that creates the demo data through Microsoft Graph. The result was a mailbox containing 30 synthetic emails spread across seven days, ready for Copilot to summarise. ...

What if a new website enquiry could be classified, researched, answered, and brought to your attention before you had even opened the notification? In this demo, I build an inbound lead workflow in Copilot Studio that does exactly that. It is a useful example of agentic automation, but I also wanted to look beyond the successful demo and understand what the two test runs actually cost. The Inbound Lead Scenario The process begins on the contact form on my website. A potential customer provides their contact details, timescale, requirements, and an indication of the support or training they are interested in. ...

Using Add a row into a table is straightforward when Power Automate can see your Excel file and table at design time. Make the file path or table name dynamic, however, and those friendly column inputs disappear. You can solve that with a JSON object, but it introduces a sneaky risk: Excel can silently ignore renamed or deleted columns while the action still reports success. In this post, I’ll show you how to compare the row object you sent with the body returned by Excel, using one simple intersection() expression. If every column is present, the flow continues. If something has changed, the flow deliberately fails and tells you why. ...

I wanted a flow that takes a PowerPoint template full of {{Placeholders}}, swaps in real client data, and spits out a finished, on-brand sales deck — all from a single button press. The clever bit is that the actual find-and-replace code is written for me by an AI prompt inside Power Platform. It worked… mostly. A couple of placeholders stubbornly refused to replace, and the fix taught me something genuinely useful about how PowerPoint stores text. Let me walk you through it. ...

When you embed a Copilot Studio agent on a webpage using DirectLine and the Bot Framework Web Chat control, it works great — but it’s text only. What if your agent could speak its responses out loud? In this post, I’ll show you how to intercept bot responses from the Web Chat store middleware and pass them to a text-to-speech engine so your agent speaks every reply in the browser. The pattern works with any TTS provider — the browser’s built-in Web Speech API, Azure Speech Services, ElevenLabs, or anything else. ...

If you’ve ever needed to dynamically create an Excel file from data in Power Automate — maybe from a Copilot Studio agent, a SharePoint list, or an API response — you’ve probably realised there’s more than one way to skin this particular cat. In this post, I’m going to walk you through three different approaches to generating and populating an Excel file, each with its own strengths and trade-offs. I’ll be using a sample F1 2026 driver grid as my data, but this could just as easily be data passed from a Copilot Studio Agent, a Dataverse table, or any other source. ...

I’ve been wanting to share this one for a while. If you’ve ever needed to generate professional-looking Word or PDF documents from Power Automate — complete with icons, tables, and styled headers — without reaching for premium connectors or fiddly Word templates, this approach might just change how you think about document generation. The trick? HTML that Word understands. In this post, I’m going to walk through the entire flow step by step, explain the key patterns that make it work, and show you the finished output. Let’s get into it. ...

Tired of the tediousclick-click-click to convert documents to PDF? If your job involves converting files manually, you know the drill — open the file, export, download. In this post, I’ll show you three ways to use SharePoint Buttons to convert documents to PDF right from your document library, ranging from quick deep links to full Power Automate automation. The Methods at a Glance Method Best For Supports 1. Word Deep Link Quick Print/Save Word only 2. Fast Browser PDF Speed & Preview Word, Excel, PowerPoint 3. Power Automate Full Automation All Office Files Method 1: The Word Print Link This is a simple deep link that opens your Word document directly in “Print Mode” within the browser. From there, you just hit print and save it as a PDF to your local machine. It’s a great entry point, but keep in mind it’s limited to Word documents. ...

What if your AI chatbot could handle routine customer questions and seamlessly hand off complex issues to a live agent — all without the customer noticing a hiccup? That’s exactly what I’ll show you how to build in this post. Whether you’re a developer, customer support manager, or IT enthusiast, by the end of this guide you’ll have a fully working Copilot connected to Dynamics 365 Customer Service Workspace and embedded on your website for real-time agent transfers. ...