Microsoft Copilot transforms into agentic AI assistant across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

Microsoft launches "vibe working" in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

Microsoft is rolling out a new Agent Mode inside Office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint this week. Previously described by Microsoft as "vibe working," the Agent Mode is a more powerful version of the Copilot experience in Office that Microsoft has been trying to sell to businesses. "When we first shipped Copilot, foundation models were not powerful enough to use Copilot to command the applications," admits Sumit Chauhan, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Office Product Group. "This meant Copilot was a passive partner in documents: it could answer questions but missed the mark when it was asked to take action on the canvas directly." The new Agent Mode is designed to better follow commands and edits in documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. "Over the past year, models have made meaningful leaps in instruction following, reasoning, and overall quality, and are now better at handling multi-step edits reliably without losing your intent," says Chauhan. You'll be able to watch the Copilot AI agent work in real time, thanks to a sidebar that shows every step Copilot is taking on a document. In Excel it can make changes directly in a workbook, adding formulas or tables. Agent Mode in PowerPoint can also update existing decks with fresh information and keep the template styling that businesses use. Microsoft is rolling out these new Copilot features as the default experience for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 Premium subscribers, and they're also available with Microsoft 365 Personal and Family plans.

Microsoft adds uninvited AI co-author to Word docs

Also rolls out agentic Copilot in Excel and PowerPoint, letting 21st century Clippy lend a... hand Microsoft is giving Copilot the power to stop suggesting edits and start making them. The company this week pushed its "agentic" Copilot features into general availability across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, turning the assistant from a sidebar prompt into something that edits documents, tweaks spreadsheets, and builds slides in place "Copilot can now take actions on your behalf across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint," Redmond said, pitching the update as a move toward software that doesn't just respond, but gets on with the job. The feature is on by default, but must be activated by users through a very prominent prompt on the right side. As always, you can turn off Copilot completely by following the instructions on this page. In practice, it's the next step in a strategy that has already seen the AI assistant threaded through Windows, GitHub, and just about every product Microsoft can get its hands on. That approach hasn't exactly been universally loved. Critics - including folks over at Mozilla - have taken aim at what looks a lot like forced integration, arguing that Microsoft is less about "adding features" and more about quietly making Copilot unavoidable. The shift to agentic behavior only adds fuel to that argument. Suggesting a better sentence is one thing, but taking a more active role in rewriting documents or restructuring spreadsheets is another, even if Microsoft frames it as working alongside the user rather than acting independently. Trust is already a sore spot, as recent scrutiny of Copilot's terms has highlighted that the AI may be unreliable and shouldn't be depended upon on for important decisions, even as it is being pushed deeper into everyday workflows. At the same time, admins have found themselves dealing with features turning up unannounced, as automatic deployments pushed Copilot further into enterprise environments, whether they were ready or not. Microsoft says that it has learned from that pushback. The company is emphasizing visibility and control, with users able to review changes and keep a handle on what Copilot is doing. It can also show what it's working on during multi-step edits, rather than leaving users guessing. Redmond added that the "new default experience is already proving more useful in real work..." based on early customer feedback, though whether that feedback reflects the average Register reader is another question. For Microsoft, the move makes sense. If Copilot is going to justify its place - and its price tag - it needs to do more than sit in a sidebar. ®

Microsoft's Copilot just became the productivity collaborator it was promised to be

* Copilot is now agentic by default in Microsoft 365 -- it performs in-app actions, not just chat. * Users report big gains: Excel +67% engagement and +65% satisfaction; Word and PowerPoint stats also rose. * Rollout begins today for Copilot, Premium, Personal, and Family plans; features are still WIP but they're improving tasks. The world of AI is moving at an incredible rate. The chatbots that OpenAI popularised a few years ago are now regarded as old news; pretty much every major company has an LLM you can talk to. Now, the focus is moving toward what's called "agentic AI," where you hand a task to a digital assistant, and it'll do what you say. It goes above simply talking back to you; instead, these agents will perform in-app actions for you as a person would. AI companies are working to make the next best agentic experience, and Microsoft is no different. The company has announced that Copilot is becoming an agent that can do the heavy lifting for you, and it'll become the default experience across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Microsoft wants Copilot to run like OpenClaw, autonomously managing your inbox around the clock It's claws out time for big AI companies. Posts By Simon Batt Copilot for Microsoft 365 can now perform agentic functions by default No need to enable anything fancy As announced on the Microsoft blog, Copilot is becoming an agent by default. This means it won't just hang out in a chatbox beside your Word document; you can actually tell it to perform actions, and it'll carry them out. It'll have access to the tools within Microsoft 365 to get the job done, too; if done properly, it should allow people to simply tell Copilot what they want to achieve and watch as the AI works away. Microsoft shared a little table which shows that people are generally happier with this new agent-based Copilot than the more chatbot-focused one: Application Change in Engagement (tries/user per week) Change in new user retention (% increase) Change in Satisfaction (thumbs up rate) Word +52% +11% +21% Excel +67% +50% +65% PowerPoint +11% +36% +25% If you'd like to give it a go yourself, Microsoft says that Copilot should arrive on your system starting today if you have a Microsoft 365 Copilot, Premium, Personal, or Family plan. And while it's still a work-in-progress, it'll hopefully make creating Excel functions a lot easier than doing them by hand. Microsoft 365 Copilot's new wave of features has been announced, with some nice productivity-boosting tools Claude is coming with, too. Posts By Simon Batt

Microsoft rolls out Copilot "vibe working" mode for Microsoft 365 subscribers

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. In brief: Microsoft is bringing Copilot's "agentic" mode to its Office productivity suite. With it, users will be able to provide instructions and let the system generate documents on their behalf. Despite ongoing concerns about hallucinations, the Redmond-based company says customers have responded positively to these capabilities. Microsoft introduced Copilot's agent mode in 2025, promising customers new "intelligent" ways to streamline document creation while large language models handle much of the work. The feature is now generally available across at least three applications in the Microsoft 365 suite, reflecting Microsoft's broader push to embed AI more deeply into productivity tools. Copilot's agentic capabilities now work in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, according to Sumit Chauhan, president of the Office Product Group. The feature is included in several Microsoft 365 subscription plans and is part of the default experience, which Microsoft says has led to stronger customer engagement based on early feedback. Chauhan explained that Copilot's agent mode can make substantial changes to documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, enabled by recent advances in foundation models. Earlier versions of Copilot were not as capable and were largely limited to assisting rather than actively performing end-to-end document creation and editing tasks. In just a year, large language models have reportedly made significant gains in "reasoning" capabilities. Chatbots are now better able to follow user instructions, produce higher-quality outputs, and handle multi-step editing tasks more reliably - while still generally adhering to the original prompt. Copilot can now be considered a real collaborator for writing documents, processing data, and selecting appropriate animations to complete multi-deck presentations. Microsoft built the new functionality in close partnership with customers, Chauhan said, and the result feels "magical" and comparable to high-quality human creative output. Microsoft is also providing guidance and tips to help users get the most out of Copilot's agentic mode. The system performs best when users already have a clear idea of what they need, focusing on formatting and data transformation rather than open-ended content generation. The Work IQ intelligence layer helps maintain context, enabling Copilot to base its edits on user signals and select the appropriate AI model for each task. The feature is now available - and enabled by default - for customers on Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft 365 Premium, and Microsoft 365 Personal and Family plans. Microsoft is currently working on further improvements to Copilot's agentic mode, including the ability to manage more complex workflows more reliably. The company also plans to strengthen Copilot's role as a cross-application system, while maintaining user control and the ability to review and approve its changes.

I put Microsoft's new Copilot tools to work in Office. It performed like an eager intern

These enhanced features are available across Microsoft 365 Copilot, Premium, Personal, and Family subscriptions, representing a significant productivity upgrade. Although Microsoft's Copilot reportedly remains far behind competing AI Large Language Models (LLMs) in terms of usage, the Copilot built into its Microsoft 365 applications remains a potent assistant. It's now marginally better, with agentic abilities that finally act on the documents you're working on. In my early tests, however, it still falls short in a few key ways -- and, of course, it's certainly not perfect on the first try. "When we first shipped Copilot, foundation models were not powerful enough to use Copilot to command the applications," Sumit Chauhan, president of Microsoft's Office group, wrote recently. "This meant Copilot was a passive partner in documents: it could answer questions but missed the mark when it was asked to take action on the canvas directly." And that's true. From that standpoint, the early versions of Copilot weren't of much use, simply offering suggestions on what actions to take. Now, it can make changes on the "live" document that you're working on in Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. It's the default experience for customers with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 Premium subscriptions, according to Microsoft, and they're also available to users with Microsoft 365 Personal and Family plans. It's likely that more users use the version of Copilot that's embedded in Microsoft's productivity apps (with over 300 million users) than the Windows 11 Copilot app itself, which has a tiny fraction of the market. Tested: Steps ahead, but with a way to go The new capabilities are only available within the version of Copilot built into the three Microsoft 365 apps themselves, rather than the Copilot application that lives within Windows. In my tests, I've found the Copilot application will create a document for you, but the quality is utter crap. The prompt was "Draft a Word document that details five ways in which water can be saved in California. Include relevant art and graphics." Absolutely horrible! Yes, Copilot subsequently offered to include attributions, more detail, and to turn the placeholder graphics into actual useful information, but I had given up by then. That version of Copilot acts like a teenager who's being forced to do household chores when they could be hanging out with their friends. Copilot for Word, however, generates far more sophisticated results. Note that there's a new menu option, allowing you to chat about a document or prompt, and then a second option to let Copilot actually take action. The second choice supersedes the first by a large margin, I think. Both the Copilot app and the Word document below were keyed to my personal account, which has a Microsoft 365 account tied to it. The prompt here was slightly different: "Draft a Word document that details five ways in which water can be saved in California. Include relevant art and graphics." Before generating the document, Copilot asked a few followup questions, trying to determine additional details on style and formatting. My first instinct was to ask for a quick-and-dirty first draft, but Copilot's insistence on nailing down certain stylistic elements was quick and convenient, relying on choices made via clicking buttons rather than writing an elaborate followup prompt. That felt rather thoughtful and well-designed. The actual creation process took a very short time, just a minute or two. Copilot's workflow was the same as within the app: It told me what it was doing as it was doing it. The difference here was that I could see the results immediately and start considering followup edits. There's still a huge omission, however, which points to more necessary work from Microsoft's perspective. Yes, "recommendations." I asked for visuals ("relevant art") and Word failed to deliver. The document it delivered included a couple of (unsourced) tables, but Copilot's inability to include relevant art is a big miss. Those are the suggestions that characterized the early version of Copilot. I don't want to have find or create art, import it, and then risk screwing up any formatting! Half the job isn't done. Content aside (I'm certainly not a water policy expert) Word got me off the ground, at least. So I saved and downloaded the document and then turned to PowerPoint. Could it turn this document into a series of slides? As it turned out, no -- and there was a key omission right from the beginning, too. I think those of us who have a nodding familiarity with Copilot, Google Gemini, and other LLMs are now familiar with the "+" symbol being used to upload a document. Word's Copilot prompt box includes this -- but PowerPoint does not. It would have been so easy to simply upload the document and have PowerPoint "translate" it into a series of slides...but no. Trying to manually point PowerPoint at the file ("Take the [filename] from from my Documents folder and create a 10-slide deck from it," didn't seem to work. Interestingly, PowerPoint took the filename (Word_Copilot_water_conserving_example_1.doc) and ran with it, creating a ten-slide presentation on water conservation in general, with sourcing from the Environmental Protection Agency, utility providers, and other groups. The process took a really long time -- ten minutes or so, by my unofficial clock -- but the results were fairly impressive. "I created a 10-slide water conservation presentation grounded in research from the EPA, utility providers, and conservation organizations," PowerPoint's Copilot reported. "The deck covers the full spectrum -- from why conservation matters and how water is used at home, through room-by-room saving strategies, appliance upgrade ROI, and outdoor tips -- all backed by real statistics and practical advice." "The slides use a deep blue and teal water-themed palette with custom AI-generated images on the title, bathroom, kitchen, outdoor, and closing slides, plus a doughnut chart, a comparison table, and a bar chart to make the data more engaging for your external stakeholders," it continued. Again, Copilot wasn't perfect: the presentation avoided sourcing, for some reason, and delivered a "doughnut chart" without a legend, meaning that its findings were incomprehensible. In each case, however, I could talk through the edits in the chat window and iterate improvements. And, of course, I could negotiate those edits either via the chatbox or manipulate various elements within PowerPoint as I normally would, with my mouse. Was it quicker than I could have researched and formatted a presentation? Most definitely. Was it the one I had requested? Most definitely not. And if I intended it to be used for anything related to my job, I would have liked PowerPoint to start with the requested document, and then work from there. It's a step forward for Copilot, and Office, certainly. But Microsoft certainly has room for improvement.

Microsoft Copilot can now do actual work inside your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files

Microsoft is rolling out a useful feature for Office users this week. The company has introduced Agent Mode inside Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, a more powerful version of the Copilot experience that Microsoft calls "vibe working." This is now the default experience for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 Premium subscribers. It is also available on Microsoft 365 Personal and Family plans. What's Agent Mode in Microsoft Copilot, and how is it different? Until now, Copilot within Office apps has been largely a passive assistant. It could answer questions, but struggled to take direct action inside your documents. Recommended Videos Sumit Chauhan, President of the Office Product Group at Microsoft, acknowledged this gap. She noted that when Copilot first launched, the underlying AI models simply weren't capable enough to command the applications directly. Models have shown significant improvement in instruction following and multi-step reasoning over the past year. Agent Mode is built on those improvements and can now execute complex edits without losing your original intent. What can Copilot Agent Mode actually do in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint? Quite a lot, actually. A sidebar shows you every step Copilot is taking in real time, so you're never left guessing what it changed. In Word, it can draft, rewrite, restructure, and adjust tone. In Excel, it makes changes directly inside your workbook, adding formulas, tables, and visuals to turn raw data into actionable insights. In PowerPoint, it can update existing decks with fresh information while respecting your company's template styling. In fact, early data from Microsoft shows engagement in Excel jumped 67%, satisfaction rose 65%, and new user retention increased 50%. Microsoft says deeper editing for complex workflows and more transparency around changes are next on the roadmap. The company has been making several Copilot-related moves lately, from launching smarter research tools in Copilot Cowork to cleaning up its presence in Windows 11 apps and doubling down on its positioning as a serious productivity tool.

I Tried Copilot's New Tools for Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, and I'm Not Sure I Will Again

Google's Gemini AI has recently become more agentic and capable inside Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides -- and now Microsoft is pushing out a similar upgrade for Copilot. These features have been in testing for a while, but they're now more widely available to individuals and companies who pay for any of the Microsoft 365 subscriptions. Essentially, Copilot in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint can now do more on its own -- not just offering advice and help, but actually taking over the business of creating and editing itself. There are a host of ways to use this, but here are just a few examples I tested to give you an idea of what's possible. If this kind of AI interference isn't for you, you can hide Copilot from view inside the Microsoft Office apps. On Windows, Choose File > Options > Copilot and uncheck Enable Copilot; on macOS, open the app menu (e.g. Word), then Preferences > Copilot. Create a new document in Word, and via a prompt bar at the top, Copilot asks you to "Describe what you'd like to draft with Copilot" -- so I asked for a 200-word introduction suitable for the foreword of a book on AI chatbots, written in a tone that's friendly, engaging, and accessible to anyone no matter what their technical level. You can also, via the + (plus) button, give it an existing file to work from. In seconds, I had a generic and stilted intro, processed from the mixing together of millions of human-crafted words and sentences. I then got a second prompt box for refining the text. I asked for my intro to be made more formal and verbose, and Copilot got to work, looking up longer and fancier words in its internal thesaurus. Click the Copilot button in the ribbon menu, and you get a side panel for requesting all kinds of edits and tweaks -- whatever you can put in a prompt, Copilot can respond to. If your boss has said your report needs to be focused more on client benefits and real-world examples, Copilot can take care of it. You then get chance to review all of the edits that have been made, and accept or reject them. It's maybe worth saying at this point that I would never get AI to write anything for me, or even suggest edits or come up with alternative headlines or article ideas -- not just because I think I can do these tasks better, but also because I'd like to engage my brain as much as possible for as long as possible. If you're happy with your work containing machine-written text, however, Copilot is certainly capable of it (and will absolutely make fewer typos than a flesh-and-blood human). I'm much less familiar with spreadsheets than I am with articles, so I was interested to see how Copilot could help me out in Excel. There's no prompt box at the top of a blank sheet, like you get with Word documents, but you can call for AI assistance by clicking the Copilot button on the ribbon toolbar. Here I asked Copilot to create a demo spreadsheet showing 10 kids and their running times in a school sports day, putting the data in a simple table and in a chart. If you're a more serious Excel user than I am, you can get Copilot to combine data from existing spreadsheets and reports, as well as putting together spreadsheets from scratch. Copilot carried out my instructions with a reasonable amount of precision, though the chart was rather hit-or-miss and could've done with some neatening up (Copilot tried and failed to do some tidying on this). Follow-up edits were carried out well, and if you're exact about the changes you want, Copilot takes care of them for you. I'm not sure I'd trust Copilot with company financials, for example, but as far as spreadsheets-via-prompts goes, I was mostly impressed. Instead of manually tallying up rows and columns, tweaking formatting, or trying to figure out the exact formula you need for the job, you can get Copilot to take over. Finally, I took a look at what Microsoft's AI could do for me with a PowerPoint slideshow. Again, the Copilot button on the ribbon toolbar is the way into the AI editing capabilities, and this time I asked it to make a slide deck promoting Lifehacker. I wanted to test its ability to pull up information from the web and to put together an entire slideshow from scratch (something I've previously tried with Claude Design). I answered some questions about the length and tone of my slideshow, and then Copilot got to work. Overall, the AI was up to the challenge, albeit in that generic, template-like way that we're all now familiar with when it comes to these synthetic creations. Producing an accurate series of slides out of nothing in seconds is impressive, though, even if I think I could've done the job better given an hour or two. Prompt-based edits work fine. Want to change the color of a background? Just say so -- it's quicker and easier than messing around with menus and toolbars, though perhaps not as satisfying. Whether you want to change the entire tone of a presentation or tack on an extra two slides of summaries, Copilot will do it. I can see these tools being useful, whether to get the basics done with the minimum of fuss, or to automate advanced edits and processes that would otherwise take up a substantial amount of time. I can also imagine many users just sticking with their current workflows. For me, I think I'll carry on doing my own Word, Excel, and PowerPoint tasks for now.

Agentic Copilot Is Now Available in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint

Microsoft is adding agentic Copilot as a default experience Microsoft made Copilot's agentic capabilities generally available in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on Wednesday. The new features are being expanded to the different paid tiers of Microsoft 365, and the agentic features will be set as the default. The Redmond-based tech giant said these features will allow Copilot to not only answer queries, but also take action directly on the document. While Copilot will be the main chatbot, users will be able to pick from a large selection of third-party artificial intelligence (AI) models. Agentic Copilot Comes to MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint In a newsroom post, the Windows maker announced that Copilot's agentic capabilities will now be available inside Word, Excel, and PowerPoint by default. These features will be available to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 Premium for enterprise users, and Microsoft 365 Personal and Family plans for end users. Microsoft says these agentic capabilities transform the chatbot in productivity apps from a passive assistant to a proactive agent that collaborates with the human user to create and edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. In Word, Copilot can draft, rewrite, restructure, and apply the desired tone for the target readers. Similarly, in Excel, it can explore data, build and explain analysis, write and apply formulas and tables, and even add visuals to the workbook. When it comes to PowerPoint, the agentic assistant can update existing decks with new pointers, use data to build a slide-based narrative, and create an entire presentation from scratch, all while adhering to the user or the organisation's brand guidelines. Notably, these capabilities are model-agnostic, meaning users can pick any third-party AI model available in the library. Based on feedback received from users and researchers, Microsoft has added granular controls to the agentic features in Copilot. This means users will be able to review changes and choose what to keep and what to discard. This way, they will remain in control over the final output. Additionally, using Work IQ, the output is kept grounded to the user's work signals. This enables higher intent awareness and output that is more aligned with the user's requirements.