Use Fabric’s standalone Copilot as your front door to Microsoft Fabric. Learn what it’s for, how to explore features and plan workflows faster, plus prompting patterns, iteration tips, and guardrails for accurate results
In The Standalone Copilot Experience in Fabric, Justin Vogel introduces a practical way to use Copilot as your “front door” to Microsoft Fabric, even when you’re not working inside a specific report, notebook, or dataset. You’ll learn what the standalone Copilot experience is, what it’s designed to help with, and how to use it to move faster when you’re exploring features, planning a workflow, or trying to understand what to do next. This course keeps the focus on real productivity, turning vague questions into clear next steps.
You’ll also learn how to get consistently useful results by giving Copilot the right context and asking better questions. Justin covers easy prompting patterns, how to iterate when the first answer isn’t perfect, and simple guardrails to keep your work accurate and appropriate for your environment. By the end, you’ll be able to use Copilot in Fabric as a reliable guide, speeding up learning, reducing trial and error, and helping you feel more confident navigating the platform.
Course Outline ( Free Preview)
Module 01 - Introduction
In this course module, Justin introduces the standalone co-pilot experience within Microsoft Fabric, a powerful AI assistant designed to simplify data exploration across multiple workspaces. Students will learn the essential setup requirements, how to navigate the co-pilot interface, and leverage its advanced features to quickly find and analyze relevant reports without manual searching. By the end, learners will understand how to trust, optimize, and apply co-pilot to accelerate insights and support organizational adoption of AI-driven analytics.
Module 02 - Getting Started
In this module, Justin introduces the standalone Copilot experience within Power BI and Fabric, guiding students through its intuitive interface and key features. He explains how to navigate the Copilot button, write conversational prompts, and interpret AI-generated results while emphasizing the importance of workspace context and security settings. Students will learn to interact dynamically with Copilot, leveraging suggested prompts and understanding its non-deterministic nature to uncover relevant insights efficiently.
Module 03 - Deep Dive Features8 min.
In this module, Justin from Pragmatic Works guides students through the standalone Copilot experience in Power BI, focusing on troubleshooting common setup issues and exploring advanced features. Learners will discover how to use the “view in report” and “explore answer” functions to validate AI-generated insights and perform ad hoc analysis through customizable explorations. The module emphasizes collaboration by demonstrating how to save and share explorations, enabling users to build reusable assets and enhance team workflows.
Module 04 - Advanced Capabilities and Trust15 min.
In this module, Justin explores advanced techniques for building trust in the standalone Copilot experience by focusing on verified answers, attaching relevant content, and transparency in how responses are generated. He demonstrates how prepping data models and marking visuals as verified answers improve accuracy and user confidence, while also explaining how to interpret Copilot’s behind-the-scenes logic through the "How Copilot Arrived At This" panel. Additionally, Justin highlights the importance of context switching and identifies friction responses that occur when working with unprepared data, emphasizing best practices for ensuring reliable AI-driven insights.
Module 05 - Wrap up and Best Practices8 min.
In this final content module, Justin explores advanced real-world use cases and best practices for leveraging the standalone Copilot experience in Power BI. He demonstrates how Copilot can create new visuals on demand from semantic models and automate communication by summarizing insights into shareable emails, enhancing self-service analytics and collaboration. Justin also emphasizes the importance of verifying AI-generated results and staying current with Microsoft’s best practices to maximize the value of Copilot in data analysis.
Justin Vogel taught high school Advanced Placement® psychology and academic research for 15 years. He holds an MS in Psychology and spent several summers teaching psychology to educators new to the subject. He has also scored AP exams, reviewed textbooks for the Florida Department of Education, and written exam questions for test banks. He has presented at professional learning conferences at the local and national level and now puts his teaching and presentation skills to use on the Power BI team at Pragmatic Works.
