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Microsoft Copilot September 2026 Updates — Shareable Skills, Brand Kits, and Rebuilt Notebooks

#microsoft #githubcopilot #ai #productivity

Originally published at https://tekmag.thsite.top/microsoft-copilot-september-2026-updates-shareable-skills-brand-kits-and-rebuilt-notebooks/

Microsoft Copilot's September 2026 update brings shareable personal skills, an integrated Brand Kit system for Excel, a rebuilt Notebook interface, and tighter cost controls in Cowork. The changes focus on making AI-assisted Workflows repeatable across teams rather than locked to individual sessions.

Microsoft Copilot September 2026 Updates

The updates arrived through a series of Microsoft Tech Community blog posts and support documentation released in late August and early September 2026. Several features launched in public preview, while others are scheduled for general availability by December 2026.

Key Takeaways

  • Personal skills now follow you across all SharePoint sites and OneDrive, stored as markdown files in your cloud storage
  • A free Brand Kit skill for Excel applies your organization's colors, fonts, and logos automatically
  • Notebooks got a two-mode interface: lightweight chat in the Copilot app, deeper work in OneNote
  • Cowork effort levels (Light through Max) and a /cost command give Users visibility into credit usage
  • Text selection in Chat lets you ask Copilot to work on specific paragraphs or tables you highlight
  • SharePoint skills can now be tested and improved with measured evaluations before sharing

Shareable Personal Skills

One of the most practical changes in this update is that personal skills now travel with you. Before, if you built a custom skill for a specific SharePoint site, you had to recreate it for every new site you worked on. Now each skill you own gets saved as a markdown file in OneDrive, and it works across all your SharePoint sites without reconfiguration.

The rollout started in public preview in August 2026, with general availability planned for December 2026 according to Microsoft Roadmap ID 567668. To use it, create a skill once in the Copilot app while working in SharePoint. A natural example: build a skill that turns lengthy documents into executive summaries highlighting proposals, expected value, decisions needed, risks, and next steps. Once created, that skill is available wherever you open SharePoint or OneDrive.

This matters because it removes the friction that typically kills adoption. People built skills for individual projects but abandoned them when they moved to new teams or sites. Repeatable skills close that gap.

Brand Kit Integration in Excel

The Brand Kit skill brings organizational design standards into Copilot in Excel without manual formatting. When you invoke the skill with @brandkit in your prompt, it applies your organization's color palettes, typography, logo assets, and template styles to charts, tables, and other workbook elements.

The skill is free and enabled by default. It lives in the Formatting folder of the Manage skills dialog in Copilot in Excel. Brand managers can create official Brand kits through the Microsoft Copilot app, and organizations can maintain multiple kits for different sub-brands, product lines, or acquired entities.

Brand kit assets pull from the Organization Assets Library in SharePoint and can include logos (primary, secondary, and variations), hex-coded color palettes, primary and secondary typefaces, layout templates, icon sets, data visualization styles, photography rules, and brand voice guidance. The Excel Blog confirmed the feature in its July 2026 update cycle, with the Copilot integration landing in the August timeframe.

For teams that previously spent time formatting spreadsheets to match brand standards, this removes a manual step from routine workbook creation.

Rebuilt Notebooks Interface

Copilot Notebooks now has two connected ways to work. The first is a lightweight experience inside the Copilot app itself, suited for quick chats, exploring references, and creating artifacts without leaving the main interface. The second is a full workspace experience in OneNote, designed for deeper project work with expanded artifact creation and team collaboration capabilities.

The two stay in sync. A button labeled "Open in OneNote" lets you move between the lightweight and full experiences without losing context. The rebuild launched in August 2026.

Additional Notebooks features in this cycle include artifact recommendations based on WorkIQ and notebook content, where Copilot proactively suggests generating Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files. Multimodal capture for Android arrived in September, allowing users to record audio, images, and handwritten notes while Copilot auto-generates structured summaries. The same capability has been available in the OneNote app on iOS and iPad since earlier.

Cowork Effort Levels and Cost Controls

Cowork, Microsoft's automation and scheduling feature for Copilot, now exposes effort level controls that let users balance quality against speed and credit consumption. The available levels are Light for simpler tasks, Medium as the everyday default, and High, Extra High, and Max for deeper analysis and complex reasoning that takes longer and burns through limits faster.

Model and effort controls now appear together directly in the compose box, so you set both at the point of prompting rather than hunting through separate menus. This update shipped in August 2026.

A companion /cost skill provides cost visibility. It shows estimated credits for the current task session, percentage of monthly credit limit remaining, credits used month to date, and when the monthly limit resets. The feature is available at aka.ms/CopilotCredits/Cost.

The Scheduled tab in Cowork was also renamed to Automations. This gives one place to view and manage both scheduled tasks and event-triggered automations. The rename rolled out in August 2026 alongside the effort controls.

Text Selection in Chat Responses

Users can now select a sentence, paragraph, or table inside any Chat response and ask Copilot to work on just that selected content. The selection previews in the prompt before sending, so you see exactly what will be acted on. This enables more targeted requests for explanations, summaries, translations, or follow-up actions without requiring you to rephrase the original query.

The feature shipped in August 2026 and is tracked under Microsoft Roadmap ID 522616.

SharePoint Reusable Skills

The September 2026 SharePoint update expanded what's possible with personal skills beyond basic reuse. You can now ask Copilot to improve a skill using measured evaluations. Run tests, define evaluation criteria, and see whether a change actually raises quality before sharing the skill more broadly.

A practical example from the release notes: a legal team refining a Marketing Legal review skill by running representative tests against evaluation criteria they define themselves. The results show whether the edit helps before it goes wider.

Additional SharePoint features announced for September include tenant-specific HTML guidance at _[tenantname].sharepoint.com_html for use with Cowork, Scout, GitHub Copilot, and Copilot Studio. Image analysis across document libraries lets you process visual content at scale without reviewing files individually. Workflows in Teams now support posting messages for file updates and routing approval requests.

Conclusion

Microsoft's September 2026 Copilot updates emphasize durability over novelty. Shareable skills, Brand Kit automation, and cost controls address the points where Copilot adoption typically stalls: skills that don't carry between projects, manual formatting work, and unclear credit consumption. The rebuilt Notebooks interface and text selection in Chat refine the day-to-day interaction model.

Several features remain in public preview, with general availability for personal skills targeting December 2026. Organizations should test the Brand Kit and effort control features in non-production tenants first, as configuration depends on existing SharePoint asset libraries and Copilot license allocations.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Are personal skills free to use?
A: Yes. Personal skills are available to Microsoft 365 Copilot subscribers at no additional cost. They are stored as markdown files in your OneDrive and require no separate license.

Q: What happens to my existing site-specific skills after this update?
A: Existing skills remain in place. The new personal skills feature applies to skills created going forward. Microsoft has not announced an automatic migration path for legacy site-bound skills.

Q: Can I use Brand Kit with Google Sheets or other spreadsheet tools?
A: No. The Brand Kit skill is specific to Copilot in Excel and works only within the Microsoft 365 environment. It pulls from assets stored in the Organization Assets Library in SharePoint.

Q: Is the /cost skill available to all Copilot subscribers?
A: The /cost skill is available to Microsoft 365 Copilot subscribers with enterprise or business licensing. Availability may vary by tenant configuration.

Q: When will the rebuilt Notebooks interface roll out to all users?
A: The core Notebooks rebuild launched in August 2026. Multimodal capture for Android is scheduled for September 2026 rollout. Other regions and license types may see staggered deployment.

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References

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