Copilot in Word brings many great features, like how it can rewrite parts of your text to improve clarity and flow or even draft content for you. It’s also a valuable, time-saving search tool you can use to instantly find specific references within your Word documents. This is very helpful when you’re dealing with a long or complex document and need to find something specific, quickly.
Let’s look at how to use Copilot to find references in Word.
How to Use Copilot to Find References
Finding references or specific parts of the text in Word documents is quick and convenient with Copilot. But note that in order to access and use this feature, you’ll need the Microsoft 365 version of Word that actually has Copilot built into it. It won’t work with older versions of Word, as they don’t have access to Copilot.
Step 1. Open the Word document that you want to search for references in.
Step 2. Click on the “Copilot” button to open the Copilot chat window. You can find the button in the ribbon on the “Home” tab, on the far right side.
Step 3. Click in the text box to start chatting with Copilot, and type in your request. When looking for references, use a format like “Show me all references to…” or “Show me all parts of this text that talk about…”
Step 4. Click on the “Send” icon to send your message, and wait a moment while Copilot processes the request and looks through the doc to find your references. Almost instantly, it should respond and deliver a full list of references.
Step 5. Look through the list to see what Copilot has found, and click on the downward-facing arrow next to “References” at the bottom of its message. That should show you a numbered list of all references that Copilot found in the text.
Step 6. Click on any individual reference to jump straight to that piece of text in the document. You can also click the little numbers next to each reference in the full Copilot response to also go directly to each piece of text.
That’s it. If you follow these steps, you should have no trouble using Copilot to find references in any document. Just remember to be as precise as you can be with your prompts – the more detail you give Copilot, the better job it should do of finding what you want.
As for why you’d want to use this feature, it’s great for both personal and professional use, especially when you’re dealing with a really long document. That could be something like a technical manual or a legal contract, and you might want to find specific bits of data without having to read through the whole thing or rely on more primitive tools, like the “Find” feature.
Thanks for your feedback!
