The paid versions of Copilot AI in Microsoft Word often appear when it’s not wanted and Microsoft isn’t giving their paying customers any choice.
Microsoft is assuming that anytime there’s a blank document or even paragraph that customers want Copilot to jump in. So they’ve put Copilot ‘front and center’ on the screen.
This applies to both paid Copilot options – Copilot Pro and Copilot for Microsoft 365.
Draft with Copilot
Open a new, blank document in Word 365 with Copilot and a big ‘Draft with Copilot’ box was appearing automatically and not always wanted.
Microsoft heard the screams from all quarters about that and in the most recent Insiders builds, there’s a change to something much less intrusive. Now you can just start typing in a blank document, just like Word users have done for decades.
If you click the left-side Copilot icon or press Alt + i (lower case ‘i’ only) then the full ‘Draft with Copilot’ box will appear.
To get back to a blank page, press Escape or the Close X at top-right. But there’s no direct way to stop it appearing in the first place.
Copilot in the left margin
Also annoying are the Copilot icons on the left of any empty paragraph.
Some people might like this or are happy to ignore the icons.
But there really should be a way to disable the icons and let the customer choose when they want help from Copilot by pressing Alt + i or the Copilot pane.
It would also be good if ‘Visualize as a Table’ appeared when it might be relevant instead of all the time (e.g. when just a few words are selected).
Solutions / Workarounds
At the moment, there’s no direct fix for these intrusions. In fact, there’s no settings or options for Copilot in Office at all. Not even an undocumented registry entry.
For a laugh, we tried telling Copilot to ‘Go away’ literally but sadly the AI system would not take the hint.
Hopefully these annoyances will be fixed over time.
