How to disable or remove Copilot from Word (there is a solution - check 2nd edit)

I just dumped all my Microsoft apps and cancelled my subscription. I'm using an office suite called SoftMaker NX ($25 a year for a subscription). It's a German company and it works much like MS Office. I had to choose a different cloud service to move my documents from OneDrive, but I honestly prefer it over OneDrive at this point.

Like anything that involves change, there are some learning curves to SoftMaker, but they're not many as much of the functionality is quite similar to Word.

As a professional writer myself, I very much enjoy SoftMaker and highly recommend it. They also offer the ability to buy their software outright if you don't want to subscribe.

As for cloud services, there are multiple secure services that don't use any kind of AI to scan your contents to make "suggestions" - they may have a heavy upfront cost, but they're totally worth it.

I'm a Mac user and had Copilot thrust upon me as well (it popped up this morning as a cheerful notification, when I opened Word).

I had to go into my MS account to investigate my subscription status, only because I'd seen someone on Reddit mention it, otherwise it would've been too late...but with the forced "upgrade" with Copilot, MS also increase subscription fees—but nowhere are users notified of this in advance, which is deeply unprofessional.

So I had to manually roll back my subscription to the one I had before (pre-Copilot) to keep my subscription fee the same. Today (Jan. 17) is when my monthly subscription is supposed to be renewed (ie, without Copilot), so I would expect to see the Copilot button in the ribbon and the annoying floating in-page icon to the left of my texts to disappear from tomorrow.

I'll post again with an update, to say if they disappeared, or if I've had to do something manually. The tips in this thread for getting rid of the icons on a PC don't work for Mac users.

I woke up this morning (in the eastern U.S.) and opened the book I'm working on to find the blasted Copilot thing every time I start a new paragraph.

As many others have said, Microsoft...WE DO NOT WANT AI FORCED ON US! Make it optional. Those of us who write for a living, those who are in university, etc. CANNOT have AI in our documents at all.

I've tried every suggestion I've seen in this thread. I can't shut it off, because Copilot doesn't appear in any of the Options lists or Privacy settings or anything. I've looked at every possible thing in Word and cannot find any options for Copilot whatsoever, which means I can't disable it in Word. I also can't find it on my computer to disable. And the instructions for reverting to an older version of Word are too much for this tech-challenged brain to understand...but we shouldn't have to jump through hoops to get rid of something we didn't want in the first place.

I have a 365 subscription. I've been using Word since 1995, I think? A really fricking long time, anyway. I would like to continue using it, but not if there's this bleeping thing that I don't want popping up and telling me to use it every time I start a new paragraph. It's distracting, it's annoying, and it's pretty much guaranteed to lose Microsoft a bunch of customers and subscribers if they don't either get rid of it or add a VERY CLEAR option for turning it off. Or, even better, remove it from the program and have an option for turning it *on* for those who want to use it.

Microsoft, stop forcing things on us that we don't want. And if anyone can tell me how to shut off Copilot in Word 365, when I've looked at every possible menu option in the program and Copilot doesn't show up--but keeps showing up in the document itself--I would be extremely grateful.

EDITED to add: I wound up asking Copilot how to get rid of Copilot, and to my bitter amusement, it told me. I had to close my document, find the Word program in my Control Panel on my computer, click "Change," click "Quick Repair," and wait. When it told me it was done the repair, I reopened my document and clicked on "Options," and THIS time, "Copilot" appeared in the options list. Clicked on that, unchecked the box that says "Enable Copilot," and now I don't have obnoxious AI distracting me from using my BRAIN to write my book.

But Microsoft, if anyone who actually has control over anything reads these... Please make NO Copilot the default, so people have to *check* the box to enable it, rather than making Copilot the default and people having to ramble through online forums and help articles and such to figure out how to *uncheck* it.

It can be disabled in the newest update of word, including in Australia.

Go file -> Options -> Copilot (4th one down) -> unclick the enable copilot.

You may need to redownload your office 365 if it hasn't been updated fully or isn't being nice.

We really should be able to disable copilot. I don't want it, nor do many others. We pay a lot of money, surely with the billions we pay, they must be able to built a box wich we can 'unclick'.

I find this really annoying!