How? I’ve been trying to find that setting since Copilot showed up in MS apps, and from what I’ve read online there is no way to shut it off.
What I did to block the future appearance of Copilot in Word2019 (not 365 or the current Office version) was to open Preferences in Word, then open Privacy (in the bottom line of Personal Settings) and turn off Diagnostic Data and Connected Experiences. I do not have the version that includes Copilot, but I think controls for Copilot are under Privacy.
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Thanks. I have 365, so apparently there is no way to turn it off.
I’m away from my Mac since copilot dropped, but see How to turn off Copilot in Microsoft 365 Family and Personal subscriptions - Microsoft Support
I’ve also heard, by the way, that if you don’t want to pay the increased price since Microsoft added copilot you can go through the process of canceling your account and then supposedly it asks if you want to continue at a reduced price without copilot features. That’s anecdotal, though. My subscription updated before the price increase so I will see what happens next year. Though I am also considering dropping my subscription and trying out Pages / Numbers (Word and Excel are the only apps I use in the suite.)
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Eureka! I swear that option was not there when I looked previously,and I’m pretty sure I was on v16.93 then. But at least it won’t bother me anymore.
I’m not sure how my subscription will be affected. I purchase 365 Family a year at a time through the military exchanges (I’m a vet) and Copilot pro is offered as an option but I have not – and will not – bother with it.
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Thanks for posting that link. I expect to start using 365 in the near future.
I noticed that the link you provided ends with a long string (alphanumeric with hyphens strewn within), which seems like a registration number or tracking information. Comment?
That particular pattern of digits and hyphens is a UUID. And you get a page-not-found error if you remove it from the URL.
Passing this UUID through a UUID decoder shows that it is a random-data UUID (that is, not based on a timestamp, MAC address or namespace).
As for why, it appears that Microsoft’s servers only use this UUID to identify the page. If you delete the human-readable portion of the URL, but leave the UUID intact, you get to the page. But if you remove the UUID portion, you get a page-not-found error.
An interesting design decision, but it does allow Microsoft to change the title-text of a page and modify the URL to match it, and still not break links generated from older versions of the page.
It should also allow for the existence of multiple different pages that have identical titles. For example, articles about how to do something for the Windows version of Office and the Mac version might have identical titles, but different UUIDs.
It might also allow for localization, if the same UUID can return different pages depending on your browser’s language configuration.
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My comment is that I did a search for “turn off copilot on Microsoft 365 macOS” and this was the link from Microsoft that was returned. I copied and pasted the link. Simple as that.
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Talking of Copilot—if we won’t be employing it—since it’s linked to a 30% increase in fees for Microsoft 365 (thanks Microsoft!) it’s important to refuse it while we can at our Microsoft account, as well as disabling it locally in Word preferences.
Here’s a good piece on how to do just that.
As noted, we do this at
https://account.microsoft.com/services/microsoft365/details?refd=account.microsoft.com
This represents a saving to me of $NZ50 pa—even if it only functions for this year’s subscription it is a saving…
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This experience is exactly as @billstanford9 Bill and the ZDNET article describe. I had to update my expired credit card first, which led to a confusing moment. But in the end I was allowed to choose the “Classic Family Plan” option after following the link to cancel my $129+tax renewal.
Honestly, I find “auto-complete” intrusive for my needs, as I’m blessed with a final-copy writing talent. Having a Copilot on board to rewrite my prose in a clunky, awkward AI fashion is exactly not what would be helpful to me.
Paying $30 a year for access to it, and being limited to 60 ill-defined credits per month, seems like a fallback to the Steve Ballmer era.
A possible issue: if you subscribe to Microsoft 365 by a prepaid 3rd party card (for example I use Costco), and have auto renewal turned off, you cannot cancel your subscription to switch to the classic plan. Microsoft says you can’t cancel because you’ve already paid through (May 2025 in my case) and doen’t offer any choice to switch to the Classic version. I will have to see what happens in May when my current subscription expires…
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While I wouldn’t wish to be the one to try it, suppose you were to switch auto renewal on and then cancel? I recall running into a similar issue when I purchased a discount subscription through Amazon. As I recall Microsoft does not handle this case very well—something about the source or licensing management division where the prepaid card originated.
What I would find even more interesting is whether Costco will sell 365 cards at the same price this coming year, or sell a similar “classic” version without the AI component.
Well, I tried it. I switched auto renewal on (for a month to month, in case there were problems so I wouldn’t be committed to a year). I was then able to cancel and switch to the Classic version, but when I then canceled auto renewal (because I don’t want auto renewal), of course the option for classic was gone.
Unintended side benefit is that my subscription was extended one month free (because of turning on auto renewal) and that didn’t go away when I turned off auto renewal. So I will have to see in June whether I can renew through Costco with Classic…
So, half credit! Yes, the auto-renewal is a separate thing that is either annoying or a real boon depending on point of view.
It will be interesting to see how this situation develops. @ace observed in a separate thread that there are some folks who really don’t see this as an imposition but rather a welcome feature. I’m not one of them, but after reading many hundreds of thousands of messages and manuscripts over the years I can see that.
It will be interesting.
I am not philosophically opposed to AI (I use Apple’s AI sometimes), but I do not want to be forced to pay an extra $30 a year for a feature that I don’t really want without any choice. I do use Word and Excel enough that I subscribe to Microsoft 365, but I try to minimize my expense by using Costco subscriptions (which usually add 3 months for free and sometimes discount the price). And I try to avoid auto renewals to save my wife from having to undo them once I pass on (Not that I’m rushing but I’m 74 and won’t live forever).
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My subscription renewed in January before the price change, and I was able to “cancel” and then keep the lower-priced subscription for next year. So I should have until January 2027 to decide for good, but I’ve spent some time in the past few weeks transitioning all of my spreadsheets to Numbers - not just opening the .xlsx files, but actually recreating them in Numbers - and will likely do the same thing in Pages, or perhaps another suite product that more directly supports .docx files. I’m ready to ditch Office (or M365 CoPilot as my iPhone and iPad report it) and go without going forward.
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Good tips here - thank you.
I have set a reminder to change to “classic” before my next 365 renewal in November.
I purchased a subscription to Microsoft 365 in May so I could use Word and other Office apps. I discovered that in a recent update I was forced to have co-pilot which annoyed me greatly. Somehow it seemed familiar… ah, then I remembered Clippy from the old day. Co-pilot is the new Clippy!
Then I changed my subscription to Microsoft 365 Personal which reduced my cost from about $100 to about $70. Good… except co-pilot still appeared in the ribbon in all apps AND my cursor had the co-pilot icon.
After reading this thread I contacted Microsoft support via chat where ended up spending more than two hours of my life that I will never recover. Eventually I was transferred to someone who seemed to understand my problem, although they regularly reminded me that I had 60 AI credits.
Finally we got to the point where support agreed to help me remove co-pilot. It’s a messy process that I will document here in case it helps someone else.
First I had to delete all the Microsoft apps. I dragged them into the trash and good old Hazel asked if I wanted to delete the many other folders and files associated with these apps. Yes!
Then I had to download the license removal tool from https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=849815
I did so and it removed more cruft.
Then I needed to go to ~/Library/Containers to delete all of these files (some may not exist):
Microsoft Error Reporting
Microsoft Excel
com.microsoft.netlib.shipassertprocess
com.microsoft.Office365ServiceV2
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft PowerPoint
com.microsoft.RMS-XPCService
Microsoft Word
Microsoft OneNote
Hazel had already removed all of them.
Next, I had to go to ~/Library/ Group Containers to delete these files:
UBF8T346G9.ms
UBF8T346G9.Office
UBF8T346G9.OfficeOsfWebHost
I discovered even more MS Office files and deleted them all.
Next, I was given an url to download Office. Note that I was told NOT to use the link in my Office account page. More on this shortly.
This installed version 16.60 of the Office apps.
After downloading it and running the installer, I was told to launch Word and then log in. I did so and YES! Co-pilot was gone!
The support person asked me to launch another office app. So I launched PowerPoint. Clippy, I mean Co-Pilot was not there! Yes! But it also told me that I had five updates for the Office apps that would take from version 16.60 to the latest and greatest, version 16.94. I was told to NOT install these updates or I would be co-habitting with Co-Pilot again.
I asked if there would ever be any updates to the version I now had. I was told that there would be security updates but it was not clear if there would every be any none-Clippy updates.
I know Microsoft has poured billions into OpenAI and Co-Pilot. But I am really not happy about getting this crammed down my throat. I told the support people that if I was forced to co-exist with co-pilot that I would cancel my subscription and go to something else such as OpenOffice. (Pages can import and export Word docs but probably does not do a good job with complex documents.)
Microsoft should provide a way to completely turn off Co-Pilot or a lot more people are going to cancel their subscriptions.
This whole experience makes me very unhappy with Microsoft.
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It seems very strange that you had to go through all of this. I’m using what I believe to be the latest version of Word (16.94), which is supposed to include Copilot. In my case, I haven’t even seen it before today (keep reading) because I had disabled all “connected experiences” a long time ago, and CoPilot won’t work without that feature.
Here’s where those settings are located:
-
Word → Preferences → Privacy:
-
Manage Connected Experiences:
-
Un-check all the boxes:
Of course, if you do this, it will disable everything involving Microsoft’s cloud servers, including (I think) the ability to directly edit documents in OneDrive. So you may not want to do that, but keep reading…
As a test, I decided to re-check those boxes. And after quitting/restarting Word, I saw the welcome box for Copilot. And after another quit/restart, the Copilot button appears in the settings:
… where it can be easily disabled:
I confirmed that the Copilot button and text is not presented in my documents when the feature is disabled.
I did find that after having done this, if I go back and turn off all of my connected experiences, the Copilot button in Settings doesn’t go away, but that shouldn’t matter, because even if I later enable it, it won’t work:
So, even though the code is present, it looks like it’s pretty straightforward to just turn it off, without having to uninstall everything and install an old version. (Maybe this was a recent change - as I wrote, I’ve had connected experiences disabled for a long time. Maybe it couldn’t be disabled in a prior release?)
I understand the issue with paying for a feature you have no intention of using, but Office is full of hundreds of features that I never use (including the entirety of Outlook and OneNote), so it seems strange to single out this feature when it seems to be no big deal to just disable it and the only visible presence when disabled is a disabled button in the Ribbon.
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Just a follow-up note that when I tried to replicate your steps, I never saw a “Welcome to CoPilot” message, though the CoPilot setting did appear in my preferences after I quit and restarted Word again (and I still never saw the “Welcome to CoPilot”.) So if you don’t get the welcome message, it may take another quit/restart to see that setting.
(I turned all of the connected experience settings back off again.)
And just a quick slightly off-topic, an organization that I consult for is using Google Workspace and has received an announcement that the per-user price is going up by $2 per month in March because of the addition of Gemini and other AI features in the workspace apps. This organization uses only Gmail, almost all from desktop and mobile clients, and one or two people (out of 14) uses Google Drive (and, again, they are just using the Google Drive client to sync to the desktop). It’s bonkers to me that Gemini/AI is now a feature that you can opt-out of. At least Microsoft is allowing that (for now) for Microsoft 365 (or whatever it’s called these days.)
The company is in the middle of a new systems roll-out (the business is very seasonal and the off-season is January to early-August) so at about this time next year I have to decide if I want to recommend and take on the task of migrating to a different platform for email.