Based on the Microsoft course MS-4004: Empower your workforce with Microsoft 365 Copilot Use Cases. The
.Xsessions here are Acme Bottling variants of that course's use-case exercises — same intent, one shared fictional company.
Welcome. This is the home page for a set of role-based, hands-on Microsoft 365 Copilot labs built around one fictional company: Acme Bottling Co.
Each session is a standalone lab you can follow start to finish. But they all share the same company and the same master dataset, so the whole curriculum feels like one real place. Learn the Copilot skill in your lane, and you'll also see how your work connects to everyone else's.
How to use these labs: Just read this page and follow the steps in your session. You don't need to install anything, sign into GitHub, download a repo, or save any code. Everything you need is linked right in the lab. Open, read, do. That's it.
Acme Bottling makes glass and PET bottles, caps and closures, and custom packaging for beverage brands across the U.S. — breweries, juice and water companies, distillers, soda and cold-brew makers. Think amber glass bottles, 1-liter PET, screw caps, crown caps, shipper cartons, and labels.
Because it's fictional, you can practice freely. Nothing here is real customer or company data — it's all made up for training.
First time here? Read Before your session further down this page — about two minutes on prerequisites, downloading your files, and where Copilot features live. Then pick your lab below.
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Session 1 — Supply Chain / Logistics— read an ERP order/shipment export for delays, exceptions, and missing data, decide who owns each next step (Acme, supplier, customer, carrier), then produce a manager status briefing in Word and a supplier escalation email in Outlook. Includes the orders/shipments export and the master reference workbook. -
Session 2 — Marketing & Creative— run cited market and competitive research with Researcher, test an approved claim against the product catalog before it ships, build a launch campaign brief for the new 500 mL PET bottle, write brand-safe copy and learn the prompt dials that improve it, draft a 6-slide executive pitch deck and a sales enablement one-pager, write a four-channel launch-event communication set, then run a brand and usage-rights review pass. Includes the campaign goals brief, product catalog, and customers file. -
Session 3 — Finance— find variance drivers and anomalies in monthly actuals with the Analyst agent, make Copilot show its arithmetic and spot-check it, attribute the variances to vendor risk using the supplier file — and make Copilot say what that data can't tell you — scrub a messy AR aging sheet into a documented rulebook and a regional AR summary, then create a one-page CFO memo, a leadership slide, and a regional GM email that matches the memo figure-for-figure. Includes monthly actuals, an AR aging sheet with planted data-quality issues, the customers and suppliers files, the leadership audience profile, and the executive memo format. -
Session 4 — Customer Service (ACs)— summarize a long customer thread, split what the customer claimed from what our data confirms, cross-check it against the shipment export, build a PTO handoff, and draft a customer-ready reply with every commitment checked. Includes the sample email thread, orders export, and master reference. -
Session 5 — Design & Engineering— analyze a CRM/opportunity export for aging deals and trends, compute win rate, open pipeline value and a weighted forecast — supplying the stage weights yourself so the assumption is visible — chart a result with its own row counts, force Copilot to show how many rows each trend rests on, flag data-quality gaps, and write a leadership summary + one slide that keeps its uncertainty. Includes an opportunities export (with intentional messy rows) and the master reference. This one carries Kyle's note that it's the group most likely to raise big agent ideas. -
Session 6 — Talent / HR— turn a Logistics Coordinator requisition into a competency-mapped, bias-checked interview guide, build a 30-60-90 onboarding plan from messy manager notes, turn a skills gap into a prioritized learning path, draft a change announcement in three formats, and build the manager Q&A that answers the uncomfortable questions honestly instead of reassuring past them. Includes the role description, onboarding notes, skills list, and change-communication brief. -
Session 7 — Legal— summarize a contract with Researcher and cite every clause, compare it clause-by-clause against Acme's standard-terms playbook, flag missing or non-standard terms with risk levels, run cited market-norm research that stays labeled as background rather than advice, and produce an executive briefing plus negotiation talking points. Includes a sanitized customer contract and the standard-terms playbook, plus the cite-the-playbook context workaround.
Note on IT: The IT group is a recap and debrief conversation, not a hands-on lab. We walk their team through what everyone else learned and flag agent-readiness opportunities. No lab file needed.
Do this once. It takes about two minutes and it applies to every lab.
1. Check you have what you need. A licensed Microsoft 365 Copilot account and the desktop Office apps — Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Copilot Chat. Your session page names the ones that lab actually uses. Sessions 2, 6, and 7 also use the Researcher agent; session 3 uses the Analyst agent.
2. Make a folder for your lab. Your session page gives you a folder name. Create it in OneDrive and put everything you download — and everything you create — inside it. That one habit is what keeps Copilot looking at the right material all session.
3. Download your session's lab kit. Each session page has one Download the lab kit (ZIP) link holding just the files that lab needs. Click it — it saves to your Downloads folder.
4. Unzip the kit into your lab folder. Right-click the downloaded ZIP → Extract All… → browse to the lab folder you made in step 2 → Extract. Your session page lists exactly which files you should see afterward — check them off before you start.
On a Mac, double-click the ZIP, then drag the files into your lab folder.
One ZIP per lab, on purpose. You get only your session's files, already named correctly, sitting in the one folder Copilot should be looking at.
If a kit link ever gives you trouble: right-click here → save the whole course as a ZIP, unzip it, and copy your session's files out of the
datafolder. Emergency fallback only — it pulls down the entire course.
5. Click Enable Editing the first time you open an Office file. Anything downloaded from the internet opens in Protected View — a yellow bar across the top of Excel or Word. Copilot can't work on a file that's still locked down, and it looks exactly like "Copilot is broken." One click fixes it.
6. Open .xlsx files in Excel as-is — don't convert them to CSV. Copilot in Excel
needs the real workbook to analyze the data. The CSVs are just the raw source.
If you're not sure where a Copilot feature lives:
- Copilot Chat — the Microsoft 365 Copilot app,
m365.cloud.microsoft/chat, or the Copilot icon in Teams. - Opening a desktop Office app — press Start and type the app name (PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Outlook), or use the app launcher (the grid icon, top-left) in Microsoft 365 on the web. When a lab has you create a new file, save it into your lab folder right away rather than at the end — Create a copy → Create a copy online → your lab folder → name it.
- Copilot in Word / Excel / PowerPoint — open the file, then the Home tab → Copilot button (lower right corner or right of the ribbon). A chat pane opens on the right.
- Copilot in Outlook — open or start a message, then the Copilot button on the message toolbar (or Draft with Copilot in the message body).
- Agents (Researcher, Analyst) — Copilot Chat → Agents in the left sidebar, or the agent picker just above the prompt box.
- Attaching a file to a prompt — the paperclip icon next to the Copilot Chat prompt box, or drag the file onto the pane. You can attach more than one.
- Format as a table in Excel — select your data and press Ctrl+T. Copilot in Excel works far better on a real table.
- Switching models — the model picker above or below the Copilot Chat prompt box.
- Custom instructions — Copilot Chat → Settings (gear icon or your profile picture, top right) → Personalization. If your tenant doesn't show this, just paste the instruction block at the top of your first prompt instead — same effect.
- New chat — the New chat or pencil icon at the top of the Copilot Chat pane.
Copilot assists. A human validates. Every exercise in every lab ends the same way — Source / Assumptions / Risk / Human check. Copilot speeds up the work; you make the call. Each session sharpens this rule for its own stakes.
Every lab pulls from one master shipment/order dataset plus a few linked reference files (customers, products, suppliers, inventory). The same delayed order a Supply Chain learner investigates is the same customer Finance reviews for payment risk and the same product Marketing plans a launch around...etc.
That means:
- One story, seven angles. You see Acme Bottling from your role's point of view.
- Consistent names and numbers. Priya Shah, Cascade Craft Beverages, SKU-GB12 — they show up across labs, so the world holds together.
- Realistic starting point. Most labs begin with a spreadsheet "exported from Acme's ERP/CRM," just like your real Monday morning.
Master files everyone shares (in data/):
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
AcmeBottling_Orders_Shipments.xlsx |
The backbone — orders, promised vs. actual dates, status, delay owner, exceptions |
AcmeBottling_Master_Reference.xlsx |
Customers, Products, Suppliers, Inventory, Orders, and Opportunities in one workbook |
AcmeBottling_Customers.csv |
Customer accounts, segments, regions, account managers |
AcmeBottling_Products.csv |
Product catalog (SKUs, sizes, materials, unit costs) |
AcmeBottling_Suppliers.csv |
Suppliers, what they supply, on-time status, quality scores |
AcmeBottling_Inventory.csv |
On-hand, committed, available, reorder flags |
Role-specific files (also in data/, used by one session each):
| File | Session |
|---|---|
AcmeBottling_Campaign_Goals.md |
2 — Marketing & Creative |
AcmeBottling_Finance_Monthly_Actuals.xlsx |
3 — Finance |
AcmeBottling_Finance_AR_Aging.xlsx |
3 — Finance |
AcmeBottling_Leadership_Audience_Profile.docx |
3 — Finance |
AcmeBottling_Executive_Memo_Format.docx |
3 — Finance |
AcmeBottling_Customer_Thread.md |
4 — Customer Service |
AcmeBottling_Opportunities.xlsx |
5 — Design & Engineering |
AcmeBottling_Role_Description.docx |
6 — Talent / HR |
AcmeBottling_Onboarding_Notes.docx |
6 — Talent / HR |
AcmeBottling_Skills_List.csv |
6 — Talent / HR |
AcmeBottling_Employee_Comm_Brief.docx |
6 — Talent / HR |
AcmeBottling_Customer_Contract_Sample.md |
7 — Legal |
AcmeBottling_Standard_Terms.md |
7 — Legal |
Running or writing a lab? The company kit has the full cast, the data dictionary, and the role → feature map.
Read top to bottom, the curriculum tells one story:
- Supply Chain finds the delayed bottle orders and the exceptions behind them.
- Marketing plans the launch those bottles are headed toward.
- Finance checks the numbers underneath it all — variances, risk, reporting.
- Customer Service handles the customers affected by delays and questions.
- Design & Engineering looks across the CRM for trends and aging opportunities.
- Talent / HR staffs and onboards the people who run all of it.
- Legal protects the agreements holding the customer relationships together.
Same company. Same data. Seven jobs. One trusted way to use Copilot.
You've already had foundational Copilot training and use it regularly. These labs skip the basics and get straight into real role scenarios. Each session teaches only the Copilot capabilities that genuinely serve that job — no feature tours, no filler. See the full role → feature-map in Acme_Bottling_Company_Kit.md.