Microsoft Copilot for Grant Writing

If you are writing grants for organisations as well as yourself, many of them will be using Microsoft 365. There is a legacy aspect to this - organisations started off on Microsoft and it is difficult to switch platforms.

There are other important reasons - how your data is handled form a security point of view, and also how it grounds results in your data.

In this post:

• What is Copilot?
• How Copilot Keeps your Data secure
• Using Copilot for Grant Writing
• My Preferred Copilot Grant Writing Workflow

What is Copilot?

Copilot is an orchestration platform, rather than a Large Language Model or LLM. I've written an easy to understand overview on what LLMs are in another post.

It is like a sandwich, with different layers which work together.

• Microsoft Graph is like a secure search for your data. When you ask Copilot a question, MS Graph fetches any files you ask for.
• For the chatbot, they use different models from other companies, mainly OpenAI (ChatGPT).
• Your Work ID (or Entra ID), looks after the permissions for your data.

The LLM (like ChatGPT) can't do much on its own. So the rest of the sandwich is the "harness" which orchestrates everything.

The harness checks you are allowed access (Work ID), gathers data such as files (MS Graph) and lets the AI draft documents or run actions - all inside a safe boundary. It's a mighty clever sandwich.

How Copilot keeps your data secure

Microsoft looks after your data very securely. I wrote about the issues of how Claude Cowork handles your data here.

• You can choose to keep your account (or tenant) on servers within the EU data boundary. This is important for GDPR. regulates the processing and transfer of personal data of individuals within the EU/EEA.
• If you have an Enterprise account, they say that "Prompts, responses, and data accessed through Microsoft Graph aren't used to train foundation LLMs, including those used by Microsoft Copilot." (Data, Privacy and Security for Microsoft Copilot page).
• Copilot inherits an organisation's existing security permissions. If you are working by yourself in your own tenancy, it's not so much as issue. But it's good for clients to know that their data is secure on this level.

Using Copilot for Grant Writing

So this is where the magic happens and the kind of things you can do. If you are working for an organisation, bear in mind that some of this functionality might not be available.

Copilot Memory

Copilot has a memory function, which you can find in Settings: Personalization.

You can ask it to add things to memory while typing in the user interface. The User Interface (or Chat Interface) is the term for the interface where you communicate with the chatbot. The context window is the entire short-term memory the chatbot can process in a single conversation turn (including uploaded files and past messages). If the chat goes over this limit, it starts forgetting earlier parts of the conversation.

So you can give it instructions to behave like a professional grant writer. Or that you prefer succinct answers.

You can ask Copilot to look at existing examples of your work and replicate your writing style.

I recommend keeping a folder of past grants you have written to help with the "grounding" of data. The more data you can base your work on, the less it makes up nonsense (hallucinates).

How all your apps are integrated in Copilot

As well as the Copilot interface, you can also access Copilot within say a Word document, or within your emails.

The following is based on when you are working in the Chat Interface. You can call on your Microsoft apps from within the interface, like ask it to pull up and summarise an email conversation.

Handling your files inside Copilot

Copilot has access to your files and documents. You can call on them when you need them.

In Claude you can give access to particular folders when working in a project, say. Copilot has all the info at its little virtual fingertips.

Copilot can't create folders, so you need to do that yourself. This is one area where Claude is very useful.

I can ask it to export a chat to a word document, and then I can download that and add it to the folder myself. It can then reference this document. Or I can open Word and use the Copilot function inside Word on the doc, which is pretty cool!

You can ask it to help with formatting. You know sometimes when you cut and paste tables, they go off the edge of the page. You can just ask it to make it look better.

You can also (in Copilot in Word), ask it to add page numbers, tables of content etc. Fidgety little jobs which take up time.

Other fidgety jobs - take a photo of any text you want transcribed and drag it into Copilot. Ideal for quotes, it won't do this for large blocks of text.

Searching the Internet when inside Copilot

Copilot can also look at websites and give you information from them in a secure way.

Copilot generates a search query that it sends to the Bing Search service... Generated queries do not include full documents, full prompts, or personal identifiers like user names or tenant IDs. (Data, Privacy and Security for Microsoft Copilot)

Copilot and Outlook

It has access to your emails. This saves a lot of time trying to find older emails. You can ask it to find emails from a contact, and it will summarise a list of relevant ones. You can also ask it to draft an email for you in the user interface and send it from there. It checks before it sends it, of course.

Copilot Notebook

There is a menu item for "Notebook" and this is very useful for grant writers—with a caveat.

You can gather all your material for an application in a Notebook (documents, Copilot chats, emails, and so on), and the answers to your questions in the chat interface are grounded in this data. This means you can look at a question in a form, ask for advice on how to fill it in, and access all the relevant data for your application.

However, for the test I did with the version I had, I had to cut and paste any text from the chat if I wanted to use it, or ask it to export sections to Word. There is a "Page" area you can work in, but ideally you would want the workflow to be smoother. It would be very handy if, like Claude, it could create a single, dynamic file which you could add to as you work. Also, I couldn't reference the Notebook container directly when working inside Word.

My Preferred Copilot Grant Writing Workflow

So with all of this functionality, you are in charge of an amazing tool for organising your data. You get to conduct the orchestra.

Within the Copilot chat interface you can draw on all your data as you need it. Surface or summarise relevant emails, cross reference policies from funding bodies, look online for sources.

You can ask it to double check your work against frameworks such the Five Case Model. You can ask it to highlight anything you have missed or mistakes you have made.

My preferred workflow is to ask Copilot to keep responses succinct. I find it better to use it to organise sources, to cross reference, to double check.

Asking it to produce long pieces of text which you then have to edit gets tiring very quickly. I think it's better to do the actual writing yourself, or else you can get lost in the midden of words it produces very easily.

Some grant assessors don't mind if you use AI, as long as you deliver what you say you will. But it produces quite generic text. Saying that, it is getting better at copying one's writing voice.

The best thing to do is get an account and start trying out the things I mention above. Give it access to the grant form you are filling. Ask it to summarise an email, find relevant websites, structure some answers, find sections in policies which strengthen your case and then export to a word doc.

And my final piece of advice is to use it as a coach. If you're not sure how to go about something, you can ask it to act as a coach or mentor. Just take regular breaks, as the speed of work is quicker, it takes more concentration. Best of luck!