How to disable copilot on microsoft office (excel, word, ppt) on Macbook

Oh the ironing. Using their own AI to assist you in getting rid of it. But yet the AI isn't actually intelligent enough to tell you how to get rid of it, because quite simply you can't.

Any faith i have in the product (which was none based on my first attempt at using it anyway) is gone.

Well done microsoft.

Clap

(extended pause)

clap

(another extended pause)

clap.

An hour with Microsoft support.

Can't disable CoPilot or the annoying Word doc prompt.

Can only revert to previous version, disable auto-updates.

I'm just one more writer and researcher with same issue. I'm a writer and studying a Masters and this is compromising my work, distracting me and leading to lost productivity - let alone the 90 minutes I've spent so far trying to resolve this issue on my Mac.

Radio silence from Microsoft. What a disgrace.

Please tell me how you remove the icon from the ribbon?

MacOS Sonoma: Unchecking the "Connected Experiences" options (top image below) turns off the AI features BUT (big ones...):

• It does (assuming they're not lying about privacy settings) exclude AI from interacting (read/write) with the documents (bottom image)
• It does not remove the annoying symbol at the start of every new paragraph
• It does not remove the copilot button from the toolbar
• It does remove a bunch of useful features - one I found was that I could no longer export a file to a pdf (I could still print to pdf, but it takes more steps.

This is such a terrible user experience - mentioned elsewhere, but this is some "Clippy" level ****. But thanks to late stage capitalism and monopoly power, I'm trapped needing Microsoft's products, as all my clients use it. I'll be hunting today for an open source alternative for me to work in. I'll still need Office (so they still get the money), but hopefully I can work most of the time without it and only open when needed.