How to Switch Off Copilot in MS Word, PowerPoint, Excel

In recent updates to Microsoft Office 365 applications, you might have noticed a tool called ‘Copilot’. A symbol appears next to where you want to type, and you’ll see it in the Home ribbon menu too. But how on Earth do you disable Copilot? And what if you can’t see the option that should be there? This blog explains all.

For context, Copilot is Microsoft’s AI add-in that can help generate content and automate tasks. It seems promising, but I find it annoying and intrusive, like the old ‘Clippy’ of Windows ’97. Maybe you do too. Personally, I don’t want a nagging AI suggesting things or distracting me. And in any case, the auto-generated content of today’s AI is not that great. I want to be the pilot and I don’t want this Copilot back-seat driving me to distraction.

Annoyingly, Microsoft in their usual infinite wisdom have not made it easy to switch off this thing they wish to impose upon creatives to hamper their workflow or generally annoy them. So in this blog and associated YouTube video (below) I share with you exactly how to do this.

But first, let’s just summarise what Copilot is about and what you can use it for. And notice I’ve used Copilot itself for the following section so you can hear from the digital horse’s mouth what the point of Copilot is. Can you tell it’s AI talking?

(Update March 2025: You can now follow this same easy method to switch off Copilot in PowerPoint and Excel too! Here’s my 2 minute video.)

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What is Copilot All About?

Copilot in Microsoft Office 365 applications is an AI-powered tool that assists users by generating content, providing suggestions, and automating tasks to enhance productivity in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

Here are five things you can do with the Copilot tool:

1. Content Generation: Copilot can help you create compelling content by suggesting text snippets, enhancing your drafts, and even generating entire paragraphs based on your writing style and the context of your document. This is especially useful for crafting reports, essays, and professional documents.

2. Automated Data Analysis: In Excel, Copilot can analyse your data and provide insights, graphs, and summaries. It can identify trends, highlight key data points, and even suggest formulas to streamline your data manipulation processes.

3. Design Assistance in PowerPoint: With Copilot, you can transform your presentations into visually appealing works of art. It offers design suggestions, layouts, and even helps in creating infographics and charts that effectively communicate your message.

4. Grammar and Style Improvements: Copilot enhances your writing by checking for grammar, punctuation, and style issues. It provides real-time suggestions to ensure your text is polished, professional, and free from errors.

5. Task Automation: Copilot can automate repetitive tasks, such as formatting documents, creating tables, and generating lists. This feature saves you time and allows you to focus on more important aspects of your work.

These capabilities make the Copilot tool an invaluable assistant in enhancing productivity and ensuring high-quality output across various Microsoft Office 365 applications.

OK, back to human writing. Yes, there’s some handy things there potentially. You can even generate some bespoke images fairly quickly (albeit AI generated images are still riddled with problems).

But I’m a laggard with such things and I have a decent workflow now, so I want to just disable the thing. Not least because it’s eating up extra battery and available RAM in the background, being poised to “help”.

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How to Switch Copilot Off

On 16^th January 2025, Microsoft released an update to easily switch Copilot off in Word. This is expected to be the same for Excel and PowerPoint in time, however they do not yet have this feature as at late January 2025, so read the next section for a workaround on those. (Update March 2025: You can now follow this same easy method to switch off Copilot in PowerPoint and Excel! Here’s my 2 minute video.)

Here’s the simple steps of how to disable Copilot, as I demonstrate in the video above:

1. Go to File then select Options
2. Choose the Copilot category
3. Uncheck the Enable Copilot box, then select OK

On Mac within the app, you’ll find the Copilot options under Preferences and then the Authoring and Proofing Tools section.

It seems really simple, but alas you might get stuck with step 2 if you don’t have the latest version of the app. In this scenario, as was mine, no such Copilot category appears! So if you can’t see this option, you might need to do the following steps first as I did to get the latest versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Here’s how to update your MS Office apps to make sure you have the latest version, so that the Copilot options to switch off are available to you:

1. Go to File then select Account
2. Find the Update Options button and choose Update Now

Once it’s done installing the updated apps, you’ll be able to access the kill switch for Copilot.

As at late January, this works for Word but not yet Excel or PowerPoint (Update March 2025: This now works). This should change soon when Microsoft release updates which incorporate this method of disabling Copilot. But for now here’s a couple of workarounds you could try if you’re desperate to ditch the Copilot…

The first is to adjust your privacy settings, which I’ll let Microsoft explain themselves. This option might affect other things though, because it disables any other ‘connected experiences’. For example, suggested replies in Outlook, text predictions in Word, PowerPoint Designer, and automatic alt text for images will be collateral damage.

The second is a bit more drastic, whereby you can try uninstalling the Copilot app entirely. Go to Settings > Apps > Installed apps, find Copilot, and click Uninstall. I can’t vouch for what happens as I’ve not done this, but there are recent forums advising on more technical solutions like this.

I hope you found this blog helpful if Copilot is proving a hindrance to you! Let me know your views and if you use this AI tool in the comments. Please support my work by either buying me a coffee and/or buying yourself an awesome, originally designed and humorous t-shirt.

Kind Regards, Adrian

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