Once Microsoft 365 is connected, Claude works directly with your Outlook emails, your calendar, your Teams conversations, and your OneDrive and SharePoint files. It can sort your inbox, prep your meetings, draft your replies, and, if your organization has enabled it, send emails and create Teams meetings on your behalf, with your approval.
Managing Microsoft 365 or Claude for your organization? See the administrator setup guide instead.
The essentials
1. Connect. In Claude: Customize, Connectors, Microsoft 365, Connect.
2. Ask. Write what you need, as you would to an assistant: sort your emails, prep a meeting, draft a reply.
3. Approve. Before sending an email or creating a meeting, Claude asks for your confirmation, unless you have allowed it to always proceed.
Before you start
- You need your work Microsoft 365 account. A personal Outlook.com, Hotmail, or Live account will not work.
- Your administrator must have set up the connector for your organization. If the connection shows an error, that step has likely not been completed: forward the setup guide to them.
Connecting your account
- In Claude, open Customize, then Connectors.
- Find Microsoft 365 and click Connect.
- Sign in with your work Microsoft 365 account in the Microsoft window.
Once connected, Microsoft 365 also works in the Claude app on iPhone and Android.
What Claude can do for you
There are no commands to learn: you write what you need, the same way you would ask an assistant. Here are some practical ways to use it.
Start your day
Claude reads your calendar and your inbox to tell you where to begin.
- Look at my calendar for today: my meetings, my free slots, and what I need to prepare before each one.
- Among today's emails, which ones genuinely need my attention? Give me a reason for each.
- Find the emails I never replied to and rank them by urgency.
Catch up on what you missed
- Summarize my Teams conversations from this week and tell me what is waiting on a response from me.
- Review my sent emails and Teams messages from this week, and give me a list of everything I promised to do.
- What was decided in the email thread with the supplier?
Prepare for a meeting
Claude pulls together the invitation, recent exchanges with the participants, and any related documents.
- Get me ready for my 2 p.m. meeting: who will be there, our recent exchanges, and the documents I might need.
Reply to an email
The safest approach is to ask for a draft, review it, then send it.
- Draft a reply to Julie's latest email. Keep a friendly tone and suggest Thursday or Friday.
- Looks good, send it.
Claude can also forward an email or reply to all.
Schedule a Teams meeting
Claude finds a free slot for everyone, creates the meeting with its Teams link, and sends the invitations.
- Find 30 minutes next week when Marc, Sophie, and I are all free.
- Create the meeting Tuesday at 10 a.m. with them, as a Teams meeting, and add the agenda.
Guests receive the invitation by email, exactly as if you had created it yourself in Outlook.
Manage your inbox and calendar
- Accept Monday's invitation and decline Wednesday's.
- Set an out-of-office message from September 20 to 27.
- Create a rule that sorts newsletters into a folder.
Find and summarize documents
- Find the latest version of the service proposal in SharePoint and summarize it.
- Among the documents shared with me this week, which ones are worth opening?
Claude reads Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, and text files. OneNote is not supported: export the page to Word or PDF first.
Approving what Claude does
When Claude wants to act (send, create, modify, or delete something), it shows you the action and waits for your response before proceeding. You have four options:
- Allow once: Claude performs this action and will ask again next time.
- Allow for this conversation: Claude can repeat this type of action without asking again, until the conversation ends.
- Always allow: Claude will no longer ask for this tool.
- Deny: nothing is done.
The middle two options are grouped under More permission options.
Our recommendation: for reading and searching, Always allow saves you time. For sending an email or creating a meeting, keep Allow once and check the recipients before clicking. A sent email cannot be unsent.
Setting your permissions in advance
- Open Customize, then Connectors, then Microsoft 365.
- Under Tool permissions, tools are grouped by type, read-only on one side and write or delete on the other.
- For each group or each tool, choose Always allow, Requires approval, or Blocked.
Your organization may require approval for certain tools. You will then see that approval is required by your administrator: you can still block the tool, but you cannot remove the approval requirement. In Teams, sending a message and posting to a channel always require your confirmation.
To disable Microsoft 365 in a single conversation, click + at the bottom left of the message area, open Connectors, and turn off Microsoft 365.
What Claude sees
- Only what you already see. Claude uses your own Microsoft 365 access. If you do not have access to a SharePoint site or a private Teams channel, Claude cannot see it either.
- Only when you ask. Claude accesses Microsoft 365 when your request requires it, never in the background.
- Shared mailboxes you have access to can be read, in read-only mode.
- Your Outlook contacts are not read. Claude finds people in your organization through the directory.
Good to know before sending
- No attachments: Claude cannot send, forward, or draft an email with an attachment.
- Up to 50 recipients per email or invitation.
- Emails sent by Claude appear in your sent items and carry a header indicating they were sent by an agent.
- A sending limit per user applies. For a large batch, Claude will need to slow down.
Running into issues?
Claude says it cannot send an email. Run this test: ask it to Draft an email to myself, but do not send it. If it cannot do that, the write tools are not enabled for your organization. That is an administrator setting, covered in the setup guide. Also check that you have not set those tools to Blocked in your permissions.
The connection fails. Check that you are using your work account and that your Microsoft 365 licence is active. Then try signing out and back in under Customize, Connectors. If it still fails, your administrator has likely not finished the setup.
Claude cannot find a document. Check that you can open it yourself and that it is in OneDrive or SharePoint, not just on your local computer. Then specify the site or file name. A file that was just added may take a moment to become searchable.
Need a hand?
If something is not working, or if you want us to show you how to fit it into your routine, get in touch.
Sources
- Anthropic, Se connecter à Microsoft 365, accessed September 14, 2026
- Anthropic, Use connectors to extend Claude's capabilities, accessed September 14, 2026
- Anthropic, Microsoft 365 connector security guide, accessed September 14, 2026