r/microsoft_365_copilot • u/Difficult-Sugar-4862 • 18h ago
Here are 12 prompts that make Copilot show its work, so you can tell whether it opened your data or guessed.
Most Copilot prompt lists tell you what to ask. Almost none of them tell you how to check whether it answered from your data or made a confident guess. These are my attempt at that.
Microsoft shipped something on 14 October that I suspect most people here have not opened yet. When Copilot personalises a response, you can select Sources underneath the answer and open a Personalization tab. It lists the custom instructions, the saved memories, the memories it learned from your conversations, and the past chats that shaped what you just read. That is Roadmap 574111, generally available as of 14 October.
That surface only tells you about personalisation. The twelve prompts below cover the rest. They are built from Microsoft's documentation rather than from tenant testing, so treat your first run as a test of the prompt as much as of Copilot. They are role-agnostic, because "did it actually open my stuff" is the same question in Planner, a mailbox or a SharePoint site.
I have read Microsoft's release notes every week since July. The thing that comes up in comments more than any prompt request is some version of "it says it can't see my Planner data" or "where is it getting this from". Usually the prompt was fine. The grounding was not.
All twelve are built from Microsoft's own documentation. Copy-paste as-is, swap the bracket.
MAKE IT SHOW ITS SOURCES
- "Answer [question] using only work content you can cite. Before the answer, list each source you are citing, with its title and last-modified date. Rules: every item you list must also appear in the Sources panel under your response, so I can check it against the interface; do not list anything you did not cite; if you have no citable work source, write 'No work source cited, do not treat this as grounded'. Stop: if you have no citable work source and the question needs my data, stop there rather than answering anyway."
- "Answer [question], then add a section called Provenance listing, for each claim you made, the specific source it came from. Rules: one line per claim; a claim with no source gets the word 'inference'; do not drop claims to make the list tidy. Stop: if more than half your claims are inferences, say so in one line before the answer."
- "Take your last answer and re-present it with a citation after each sentence. Rules: quote each sentence verbatim from that answer, and mark any sentence you cannot quote verbatim as [changed]; use the document title, not a generic phrase like 'your files'; a sentence from no source gets [no source]. Stop: do not improve the wording, and do not add anything that was not in the previous answer."
FIND THE BOUNDARY OF WHAT IT CAN REACH
"For [topic], tell me the date range and the locations you can actually see: which SharePoint sites, which mailboxes, which Teams channels, which Planner plans. Rules: separate what you searched from what you found; name anything you expected to reach and could not; do not summarise the content. Stop: if you cannot enumerate actual locations, say that plainly rather than describing your capabilities in general terms."
"Try to retrieve one item from each of these in turn and report per target: [site], [mailbox], [channel], [plan], [connector]. Rules: for each, say whether you returned a citation and name the item if you did; if you returned nothing, write 'this attempt returned nothing' rather than 'I cannot access it', because those are different claims; do not generalise about permissions. Stop: report the five results and stop. Do not suggest workarounds yet."
"I expect you to be able to read [specific plan, site, or mailbox]. Try it now and report back. Rules: say whether you reached it, partially reached it, or could not; if you could not, give the reason you actually hit, not a general explanation of permissions. Stop: do not suggest workarounds yet."
"What is the oldest and newest item you can see in [location]? Rules: give actual dates from actual items; if you cannot see a date, say which item and why. Stop: if you cannot see the location at all, say so in one line."
CATCH IT ANSWERING FROM THE MODEL
"Answer [question] twice. First with an inline citation for every claim, drawn from my work content. Then again with no citations, from general knowledge. Label the two Cited and Uncited. Then list, one line each, every place they disagree. Rules: if the Cited version has no citations, write 'Cited: none available' rather than quietly reusing the other one; disagreements only, do not reconcile them. Stop: stop after the disagreement list. Do not tell me which to believe."
"For your last answer, rate each paragraph: FROM MY DATA, PARTLY, or GENERAL KNOWLEDGE. Rules: rate every paragraph, including the opening; where you rate PARTLY, name which half came from where. Stop: do not rewrite anything."
"Tell me three specific things you would need access to in order to answer [question] properly, and whether you currently have each one. Rules: be specific, a named site or plan or mailbox, not 'your documents'; mark each Have, Partial or Missing. Stop: if all three are Missing, say the question is not currently answerable from my data."
BEFORE YOU TRUST IT ON SOMETHING YOU CANNOT CHECK
"I am about to use your answer in [a status report / a client email / a decision]. List everything in it that I should verify myself before I do, ordered by how much damage it would cause if wrong. Rules: include anything you inferred; include anything from a source older than 30 days; say why each one is risky. Stop: do not reassure me at the end."
"Look at the Sources panel under your last answer. Name any source listed there that you did not cite in the answer, and say in one line what it would have changed. Rules: only sources actually listed in that panel; do not speculate about sources you might have seen. Stop: if you cited everything listed, say so in one line rather than inventing omissions."
SUGGESTED FIRST RUN
Run prompt 1 against a question you already know the answer to. If the source list comes back empty, or names things you did not expect, that is worth knowing before you trust it on something you cannot check yourself. If the prompt itself misbehaves, that is worth knowing too, and I would rather hear about it than not. Test the instrument on a known quantity first. Prompt 8 is the one I would keep for anything that leaves your desk.
THREE PLACES THIS USUALLY BITES
Project managers: run prompt 6 at a specific plan and make it name the plan and the board. Planner grounding depends on preview state and licensing, which is why two people on the same tenant get different answers about whether it works at all.
Admins: shared and delegate mailboxes are their own case. Microsoft has Copilot Chat in shared and delegate mailboxes on the roadmap as in development (573698, 13 October), for users with read and manage or folder-level permission, when the mailbox is added as a resource. Today, "it can't see the shared mailbox" is usually correct rather than broken.
Anyone using connectors: prompt 5 is the one that tells you whether a connector is in scope or merely installed.
THE ONE PRINCIPLE
A control you never configured is not a control set to off.
Microsoft documented this unusually plainly on 13 October, on the retrieve tool page for Work IQ MCP. You can pass a capabilities list that acts as a source allow list for a single request. Omit it, or pass an empty array, and Work IQ searches all sources available to the selected agent and strategy. Omission is not restriction.
That is a developer-facing page and most people here will never call that API. I am quoting it as the clearest written example of why an omitted setting should not be read as "no sources". It does not tell you how the chat window picks its sources, and I am not claiming it does. It tells you which way a vendor's defaults tend to point when nobody configures them. All of the retrieve tool is public preview, by the way, none of it generally available.
Which of these came back with an empty source list on your tenant? That is the interesting one, and if you tell me the surface, a Planner plan, a shared mailbox, a specific SharePoint site, I will tell you what actually governs it.
