Dani Brandsema

This blog was originally written for Team Copilot and is republished here on my personal website.

Review cycles are one of those parts of our work that rarely get attention, until they take up an entire afternoon. You share a document or a presentation, colleagues leave feedback, and then it becomes your job to work through every comment one by one. Some are quick fixes. Others require rewriting a section or rethinking a slide. It adds up, and it is exactly the kind of task that eats time without feeling like real progress.

This month I want to zoom in on a feature that directly touches that process. Copilot can now write, reply to and resolve comments in both Word and PowerPoint. It sounds like a small addition on paper, but once you start using it, it changes how collaboration in a file actually feels.

Why this matters

Until recently, Copilot lived mostly in the content of a document or a slide. It helped you draft, rewrite or summarize, but the comment layer stayed a manual task. You still had to open every thread yourself, read the feedback and decide what to do with it.

That has changed. Copilot can now read comments, act on them, respond to them and close them out, directly inside the file. For anyone who spends time reviewing or being reviewed, that is a meaningful shift. It moves Copilot from helping you create content toward helping you manage the process around that content, which is exactly where a lot of hidden time gets lost.

How I use this in PowerPoint

In PowerPoint, this fits naturally into how I already work. I build a presentation, share it for feedback, and my colleagues leave comments directly on the slides. Normally, I would go through each comment myself, decide on the right change and edit the slide.

Now I can simply ask Copilot: “Process this comment in the best possible way.” Copilot reads the comment, applies the change and shows me what it did. From there, I approve the update, or I go through the comments one by one afterward to check whether I agree with how Copilot handled them.

What I appreciate here is that the control stays with me. Copilot speeds up the first pass, but the final judgment still sits with me before anything gets resolved.

Soon, this will been extended even further. Copilot in PowerPoint can then turn comments into assigned tasks and notify the right people directly from the thread. So a piece of feedback does not just get processed. It can also be routed to the person who needs to act on it, without leaving the presentation.

How I use this in Word

Word works in a similar way, and I tested this myself as well. You can ask Copilot something like: “If there are comments, process them and resolve them right away.” Copilot reads through the open comments, applies the requested changes and closes the threads, all in one prompt.

What I find genuinely useful is the reverse scenario. You can ask Copilot to go through a document and add comments in places that need clarification or that might raise questions from a reader. Copilot reviews the text and places comments where it sees a gap or an ambiguity. For documents that are being prepared for external review, that is a helpful way to catch issues before someone else does.

A prompt I have found useful for this: “Go through this document and add a comment wherever a reader might have a question or needs more clarification. Keep the comments short and specific to the passage.”

This currently rolled out to general availability, alongside word-level Track Changes. Microsoft is positioning this specifically for legal, finance and compliance work, where an auditable trail of changes matters. That framing makes sense to me. The more a document carries weight, the more you want every edit and every comment to stay visible and traceable.

One thing to keep in mind

There is a detail worth being aware of. When Copilot adds or replies to a comment, it appears under your own name. If you share the file with someone else afterward, it looks as if you wrote and answered that comment yourself.

For most day to day work, that is a minor detail. But in a review process where trust and transparency matter, it is worth knowing. If a colleague assumes every comment under your name reflects your own read of the document, it is fair to be transparent about which comments came from you and which ones Copilot generated or processed on your behalf. It does not take away from the value of the feature, but it is a habit worth building alongside it.

Closing thoughts

What stands out to me about this update is how ordinary it feels once you start using it, and how much time it quietly saves. Review cycles have always been a manual, repetitive part of working in a file. Copilot handling the first pass, and giving me the option to check and resolve at my own pace afterward, is the kind of improvement that does not need a big announcement to matter.

It also says something about where Copilot is heading. Not only helping you create, but helping you carry a document or a presentation through the full cycle of feedback, revision and approval. That is where collaboration actually happens, and it is good to see Copilot finally show up there too.