Install R2 Copilot and run your first prompt
Before you start#
- One of the supported apps: Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint or OneNote. See Supported apps for which listing covers which app.
- Permission to install an add-in. In a managed tenant an administrator may need to approve it for your organisation.
- A few minutes. Nothing has to be configured before the first prompt.
Each app has its own listing in the Microsoft marketplace, published under Stealth Mail — the company behind R2 Copilot:
- Outlook — listing
WA200005943 - Word, OneNote and PowerPoint — listing
WA200006000 - Excel — listing
WA200006007
Press Get it now on the listing. If you are installing for a team rather than yourself, hand these identifiers to whoever administers your Microsoft 365 tenant; they are what the admin center asks for.
Follow the store flow to install, then open the app. The add-in appears on the ribbon of the app you installed it into.
Click Get Started and approve the use of the add-in. The add-in asks for the access it needs to read the item you are working on and write the reply it drafts — in Outlook, that means the body, subject, sender, recipients and attachments of the message you have open.
On the main panel, click the [...] icon to open R2 Copilot. The panel opens beside your document or message; you keep working in the app itself.
Type what you want in plain language: summarise this thread in three sentences, reply politely and ask for the invoice, explain what changed between these two columns. The assistant answers in the panel, and you decide what goes into the document.
Rolling it out to a team#
An administrator can deploy the add-in centrally instead of asking each person to install it, using the listing identifiers above. Two things are worth agreeing before the rollout: who is on the subscription, since prompts and tokens come out of one shared pool (Plans and pricing), and what your security review needs, which is answered on What is stored and what is not.
The free trial#
R2 Copilot is free to try before you subscribe. On the main page of the website, under Try for Free, select the application you want to activate the free version for. At the end of the trial period you need a subscription to keep using the assistant — see Plans and pricing.
When you close the add-in#
Closing the add-in ends the session. Content you composed and prompts you entered are discarded at that point, and no chat history is kept. This is the intended behaviour, not a timeout: if you need a draft, copy it into your document before you close the panel.
If the panel does not appear#
- Check that the add-in is enabled in the app's add-in list; a managed tenant can block add-ins by policy.
- Check you installed the listing that covers your app — the Word listing also covers OneNote and PowerPoint, but Outlook and Excel have their own.
- Still stuck: send the app name, its version and what you see instead of the panel to the contact form. What to include.
Next#
- Plans and pricing — what to pick when the trial ends.
- What is stored and what is not — the question your security team will ask first.
- Outlook, Word, Excel — what the assistant does in each app.