Copilot’s integration in Microsoft Office is really shitting me
I pay an annual subscription fee for Microsoft Office – or what is now called ‘Microsoft 365’. That means I always get the latest versions of Microsoft’s Office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Well, the latest versions of these apps all now have Microsoft Copilot integrated into them in the most irritating way possible.
The revenge of Clippy
In Word, for example, Copilot muscles its way into your writing flow through an icon that appears at the start of every new paragraph on your page (highlighted by the red square in the screenshot below).
Screenshot from Microsoft Word showing the first two paragraphs of this post being written. There is a Copilot icon in the left margin, just next to where the author is about to start typing the third paragraph. That icon has been highlighted in the screenshot by a red coloured, rounded square.
Infuriatingly, in PowerPoint this icon appears above each slide, forcing you to reduce the zoom on your slide if you want to be able to go from one slide to the next using the ‘Down’ arrow on your keyboard or the scroll wheel on your mouse with just a single keypress/scroll.
Screenshot from Microsoft PowerPoint showing a Copilot icon above the top-left corner of the slide. That icon has been highlighted in the screenshot by a red coloured, rounded square.
Tell Microsoft to stop it. Just stop it.
I’m not the only one who finds this incredibly irritating. Unfortunately, an online search on how to remove these icons gave me only questions and no answers:
How to remove Copilot icon from PowerPoint (without disabling Copilot)
How do I remove the Copilot icon from slide view in PowerPoint?
I did, however, find two requests in the Microsoft Feedback Portal about these annoyances:
So if you’re someone who also uses Microsoft 365, could you please do me a favour? Sign into the Microsoft Feeback Portal to both vote for those issues and add a comment of support under each as well (since that counts for more than just your vote).
Thank you!
What does the fox say?
For the hell of it, I asked Copilot how I could remove that icon from PowerPoint and the answer it confidently gave me was completely wrong (though it all other situations in PowerPoint this answer would have been completely right).
Screenshot of a Microsoft Copilot window in which Copilot tells the user to right-click on the Copilot icon and select “Hide Icon” from the context menu.
I down-voted that answer and asked again. It gave me another wrong answer. (Though, again, if Microsoft had integrated Copilot in the usual way, this answer would have been right.)
Screenshot of a Microsoft Copilot window in which Copilot tells the user to go to File > Options > Add-ins and disable the Copilot Add-in to PowerPoint.
To its credit, when I told Copilot both answers were wrong it asked me reach out to Microsoft Support and to provide feedback on the Microsoft Q&A Community. It even offered to help me post my query and feedback. So at least that’s something.
Screenshot of a Microsoft Copilot window in which Copilot tells the user, “I understand how frustrating that can be. It seems like this is a common issue, and there isn't a straightforward way to remove the icon through the PowerPoint interface itself. I recommend reaching out to Microsoft Support for more specific assistance. They can provide guidance tailored to your version of PowerPoint and system setup. You can also post your concern on the Microsoft Q&A Community with the tags PowerPoint and Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 Development. The experts there are proficient in handling such customization queries.”
The beatings will continue until morale improves
Microsoft will continue to shove Copilot down our throats until enough of us complain and maybe then they’ll give us the option to disable it. Or better yet, make its annoying icons opt-in instead of opt-out.
Though given how user-hostile and user-indifferent Microsoft has been over the last several years (aka how they’ve been on the path to enshittification), who knows if anything will change without governments fining them heavily and forcing them to change.
*sigh*