Office Add-in
The Microsoft 365 app adds a Zeta Alpha panel to Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The panel chats with your agent about the email, document, workbook or presentation that is open, and with the Office Add-in Tools turned on, it changes it for you.
Opening the panel
| App | Where |
|---|---|
| Outlook | Zeta Alpha on the ribbon of an open email, draft or meeting |
| Word, Excel, PowerPoint | Home → Zeta Alpha |
The first time, sign in to Zeta Alpha in the panel. A panel left open in Outlook follows the email you select.
What the agent sees
Each message you send carries what is open, so the agent answers about it without you pasting anything.
| App | Sent with each message |
|---|---|
| Outlook | Subject, sender, recipients, date, attachment names and the body |
| Word | The document's text and the selected text |
| Excel | The workbook's name. The agent reads sheets, ranges and formulas with its tools when the question needs them |
| PowerPoint | The presentation's name. The agent reads slides with its tools when the question needs them |
Up to 20,000 characters are sent. The agent also keeps its usual tools: search over your organization's documents, connected MCP servers, and the rest of what the agent is configured with.
What the agent can do
| App | Changes |
|---|---|
| Outlook | Open a prefilled new email, reply or reply all; write into the open draft, set its subject, add recipients; open a prefilled meeting or fill in the one being written |
| Excel | Read ranges, find text, list sheets, tables and charts; write values and formulas; format numbers, colors, fonts, borders, widths and merged cells; dropdowns and number limits; conditional formatting (color scales, data bars, icons, thresholds, top N, duplicates); tables with sorting, filters and totals; charts; pivot tables; add, rename, copy, delete or freeze sheets; place a picture |
| Word | Read the outline, paragraphs, comments and tracked changes; write formatted text (headings, lists, tables, links, pictures) anywhere, including headers and footers, optionally as tracked changes; apply styles and highlights; add, reply to and resolve comments; accept or reject tracked changes |
| PowerPoint | Read the layouts and each slide's shapes; add slides on the presentation's own layouts with a title, bullets, a table and a picture; edit a slide's text, tables, pictures and layout; move, duplicate and delete slides |
Pictures come from the same chat: an image the agent generates, or a chart it plots from your data. Charts on slides are such pictures. A table or picture added to a slide without a position goes below or beside what is already there. Each change reports what it replaced, so you can ask the agent to undo it.
Emails and meetings are opened prefilled, never sent: you review and send them.
Approving a change
Every change shows a card in the panel with what the agent wants to do. Rows of cells, such as the values for a range or a table, show as a small table. Edit the values if needed, then Allow once, Always allow or Deny. The panel makes the change in the open file and the agent reads the result, for example the range it wrote or the error Excel gave. Always allow makes later calls of that tool in the chat run without asking. Reading the workbook, document or presentation runs without asking. An admin can change when the panel asks with the agent's Asks first setting or a setting rule, as for any tool; see Office Add-in Tools.
Excel formulas that reach outside the workbook (WEBSERVICE, HYPERLINK, IMAGE, RTD, CALL, REGISTER.ID, FILTERXML or a DDE link) are refused, so a workbook never sends its data to an address. Word and Outlook only take pictures made in the chat, never from a web address.
Chats stay with the file
In Word the panel's chat is saved in the document: close and reopen it and the panel opens itself on the last chat you had in it, and each person who opens the document gets their own chat. In Excel and PowerPoint the panel keeps the chat for each file in your browser, so it comes back when you reopen the file on the same browser. Panel chats are in your Zeta Alpha chat history, and a Zeta Alpha tab already open shows them when you return to it. If you are signed out, the panel asks you to sign in first and then opens the chat.
In Outlook the chat belongs to the email or meeting.
Workflows
With the Microsoft 365 MCP server mounted on the agent, it can also read your mail, calendar, Teams chats, meeting transcripts and OneDrive, so the panel can bring that into the file. Some prompts to start from:
| App | Prompt | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Outlook | "Draft a reply with the figures from our latest pricing sheet." | Searches your documents, opens a prefilled reply with citations |
| Outlook | "Set up a follow-up with everyone on this thread next week, agenda from this email." | Checks the calendar, opens a prefilled meeting |
| Outlook | "What did we promise this customer in last month's call?" | Reads the meeting transcript and answers next to the email |
| Word | "Turn yesterday's project meeting transcript into minutes with decisions and actions." | Inserts headings, bullets and an action table |
| Word | "Review this contract against our standard terms and comment where it differs." | Turns on tracked changes and adds comments on each passage |
| Excel | "Pull the deal sizes from the quotes in my mail this month into this sheet." | Writes the rows, formats them as a table and adds a chart |
| Excel | "Add a total row and color the margin column from low to high." | Sets formulas, adds a color scale |
| PowerPoint | "Add a slide summarizing the Q3 report, and fix the title on slide 2." | Adds a slide and sets the title text |
| PowerPoint | "Make a speaker slide for each key finding in the research on our index." | Searches your documents, adds one slide per finding |
Setup
An administrator uploads the app and turns on the tools, see Microsoft 365.