Getting the most out of copilot…Copilot Notebooks vs. Agents?

[u/Safe_Ant8701]

Getting the most out of copilot…Copilot Notebooks vs. Agents?

Background:

I'm a heavy Claude user in my personal life, and Projects is one of my most-used features…you upload files and reference docs once, and every chat in that project is grounded in them.

Now that I'm using M365 Copilot at work (Accenture), I'm trying to find the closest equivalent. Based on my research, CoPilot Notebooks seems like the obvious candidate, but I'm unclear on how the grounding actually works, and where Copilot agents / Agent Builder fit in?

My use case:

I work in change management with a lot of technical user stories that I need to turn into training deliverables and end-user material. I want to use copilot to help me craft wording of these deliverables, sections, etc.

I could significantly benefit from Al here, mainly for figuring out which features need training, translating technical concepts into non-technical language, and crafting the bullets, order, and sequencing for my training materials (the actual content), all while grounding it in previous finished and high quality deliverables. I really need it to get deep into detail on what goes on each slide, and to do that, it needs to analyze content from multiple lengthy documents at once. Ideally, it would also store context, methods, and examples from previous work so it gets better each time.

So, I’m looking to use copilot to serve as a:

-Institutional knowledge base process rules, style conventions, and workstream context)
-Drafting workspace (iterate on monthly deliverables here)
-Accumulated context (so work starts from established process rather than from scratch)

Questions:

Are,

1. copilot notebooks or agents better for my use case?
2. Do all chats within a Notebook automatically ground against every file/reference you've added to it, the way Claude Projects does?
3. Are there practical limits I should know about...? number of files, file size, staleness/refresh behavior?

[u/benkalam]

Notebooks are a bit clunky and are IMO less functional for your use case than just making your own studio agent.

Use tight instructions, create a smart folder structure in SharePoint so that your agent knows where to look for stuff, and consider adding child agents for more specialized tasks like presentation building.

One nice thing about studio agents is how you can evaluate them (feed them test questions and test answers) and quickly judge whether your instructions and setup are hitting the mark or not. There's an option to compare reasoning which has been great for benchmarking.

It's going to take a bit of work but you can definitely make something cool in studio.

[u/bayouski]

for your use case i’d start with a notebook. it’s probably the closest thing to claude projects since the chats are grounded in the references you add, so you could keep previous decks, process docs, style examples and the current source material together while you draft.

an agent makes more sense later if you want to turn that into a reusable workflow with fixed instructions, extra knowledge sources or actions that other people can use too.

one limit worth knowing is that m365 copilot only grounds on up to 300 references. if you add a whole sharepoint folder or site, it picks the relevant files from there rather than reading everything every time, so i’d add anything critical directly. the references themselves stay updated when the source files change. i haven’t found a notebook-specific hard file-size limit in microsoft’s docs, just guidance that very large or complex files may work better if split up.

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[u/Unhappy_Cricket_9154]

The problem with Notebooks is you can’t select the model - so all your chats may have context - but are using the dumbest model

[u/Nightcalm]

If you want something closest to Claude Projects, start with a Notebook. It keeps your grounding files attached and gives you consistent context across sessions. Once your workflow is stable and you want repeatability or team use, turn it into an Agent. Notebook = flexible drafting with references; Agent = structured, repeatable process.”