[HN Gopher] You can't turn off Copilot in the web versions of Wo...
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       You can't turn off Copilot in the web versions of Word, Excel, or
       PowerPoint
        
       Author : artbristol
       Score  : 87 points
       Date   : 2025-10-30 17:10 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (support.microsoft.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (support.microsoft.com)
        
       | Citizen_Lame wrote:
       | Future is now, old man.
        
       | MisterKent wrote:
       | Try going to OneDrive to see your stuff if you want to be really
       | annoyed.
        
         | ch4s3 wrote:
         | Directions unclear, stuck in sharepoint auth loop.
        
       | bgwalter wrote:
       | Inundate Microsoft Support with questions how to turn off Clippy
       | Clanker until they stop. They _did_ remove the original Clippy
       | after a while.
        
       | dgan wrote:
       | You also cant disable the stupid "Pin Copilote" in teams, even if
       | the company doesnt actyally have copilote
       | 
       | Just regular agressivness from an agressive company
        
       | mainecoder wrote:
       | please can we have a no AI button perhaps with regulation even
       | when using AI if someone does not want it temporarily it can be
       | toggled off but they need AI was used by X % of users and
       | millions of times metrics for promo so NO
        
         | hagbard_c wrote:
         | There is a crude version of such a button but it might no be
         | what you want: the _No Microsoft_ button. It behaves just like
         | its siblings, the _No Google_ , _No Apple_ and all the other
         | _No ${undesirable_company}_ buttons. As long as you allow any
         | of those companies access to your data they will be used for
         | whatever purposes they consider beneficial to their
         | competitiveness and /or bottom lines. Should this be found it
         | it generally was a 'mistake' which will be 'rectified' and the
         | dance continues. The only way to win this game is to refuse
         | playing it, How a bout a nice game of chess?
        
         | vee-kay wrote:
         | AI LLMs are not profitable because they are not the product, we
         | are the product (our data - our information, our privacy, our
         | identity, our needs, our desires, our family photos/videos,
         | etc.).
         | 
         | So no, the AI "feature" cannot be turned off, because it needs
         | to be active and continuously spying on us and leeching our
         | data to "train" them to spy better and more intrusively.
         | 
         | All so we get targeted ads everywhere that are more tightly
         | coupled to our lives, and so our lives can be dictated,
         | controlled and exploited by the powers that be.
        
       | rschiavone wrote:
       | Feature so good you can't turn it off, so they can show in their
       | internal metrics 100% adoption
        
         | DelightOne wrote:
         | They don't wanna be like Facebooks' .1%.Thy know your user.
        
       | vee-kay wrote:
       | And we don't even need to wait till Copilot starts serving us
       | popup ads.
       | 
       | https://www.pcworld.com/article/2633816/giant-ai-ads-are-com...
        
       | jandrese wrote:
       | I switched entirely to Libreoffice a few years ago and am still
       | waiting to slam into that "this feature is only found in real MS
       | Office" wall that everybody told me was coming.
       | 
       | I don't think I'm going to switch back over OneDrive or Copilot
       | integration.
        
         | UnserMannInK wrote:
         | Im still waiting as well. And while I've found it to be
         | infuriating at times it is still better than ,,the real" Office
         | for everything I do.
        
         | RandomBacon wrote:
         | The only issue I've run into is in Spreadsheet vs Excel:
         | 
         | I would like to multi-color a cell.
         | 
         | I believe Excel does this by dividing the cell diagonally and
         | coloring each triangle differently.
         | 
         | Im Spreadsheet, I just use a solid background and then a
         | different color border.
        
       | SilverElfin wrote:
       | Anticompetitive bundling. We need new laws to protect fair
       | competition.
        
         | kulahan wrote:
         | Like including only Internet Explorer in your OS? :)
        
         | more_corn wrote:
         | We already have that
        
         | bigyabai wrote:
         | > We need new laws to protect fair competition.
         | 
         | No we don't. We need to enforce the preexisting ones.
        
       | rtjahsgT wrote:
       | The detrimental influence of "Satya" (why do people like Bibi and
       | Satya always have the cute names for sympathy?) continues. He is
       | a horrible person:
       | 
       | https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/mic...
       | 
       | Maybe Stephen Miller should take look at deportation.
        
       | JohnFen wrote:
       | It really does seem like Microsoft is intentionally making the
       | lives of their users difficult, like they're trying to win some
       | sort of malevolent contest.
        
         | ratelimitsteve wrote:
         | they're competing for investor money by trying to shout "AI"
         | the loudest
        
       | more_corn wrote:
       | We should start calling it "the hallucinator" Can you imagine how
       | this is going to look when the first excel hallucinations start
       | cropping up?
        
         | layer8 wrote:
         | To put a more positive spin on it, they should call it "muse".
         | It generates musings.
        
       | antiloper wrote:
       | Copilot is the most incompetent AI tool I've ever used, which is
       | bizarre since you'd think with the Microsoft/OpenAI partnership
       | they'd make it so that Copilot uses the ChatGPT model.
       | 
       | It's most egregious on Azure, which has a copilot button on every
       | page, and anytime I try to ask it about a precise configuration
       | question for a resource, it NEVER answers correctly. So you have
       | to search on whatever set of microsoft Q&A platforms,
       | stackoverflow questions, and github issues/discussions to maybe
       | find an answer like in the prehistory of 2020.
        
         | curioussquirrel wrote:
         | Azure copilot is really something. It can't see the context of
         | the page it's embedded in, and the message you send is limited
         | to 500 characters, so good luck pasting a log or configuration.
        
       | normalaccess wrote:
       | That's because AIs can't survive by eating their own output. The
       | only solution they know to ward off model collapse is more human
       | input. They _need_ _you_ to use AI to feed the beast. And if it
       | 's built into your office apps, they get that data for free.
       | 
       | That's part of why every service and system are getting
       | integrations, It's not for us it's for data harvesting.
       | 
       | In the end that's what "Windows Recall" will be used for. Access
       | to every moment of every user for every app... Can you imagine
       | the training data that would provide? An AI that could run any
       | program ever created.
        
       | profsummergig wrote:
       | I used to go to office.com to use web versions of Word, Excel,
       | Powerpoint.
       | 
       | Imagine my pleasant surprise (/s) when recently I went there, and
       | the icons for these apps had vanished. Instead there was a giant
       | gaping textbox for Copilot. A minute or so of staring at it, and
       | I noticed a "Create" link on the left. That led to a page that
       | invited me to do various things (e.g. "create a presentation",
       | presumably with the web version of PowerPoint). The icons were
       | still missing though.
       | 
       | Also notable: My work-issued Windows computer has Copilot, and
       | Copilot 365. I have no idea which does what, and what's the
       | difference between the two.
        
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       (page generated 2025-10-30 23:01 UTC)