How to disable Copilot for all applications - Mac

How is this the first answer? lmao.

God forbid any of you actually answer this easily.

If you had read even part of the thread you would see that this option was not available originally to anyone and still is not on some people's installations.

There's no doubt that the noise is justified but this is not where it does any good. This is a peer-to-peer support venue hosted by Microsoft but not monitored by Microsoft decision makers.

Well, that's a fair point. Participants should know they're in a user forum and be posting for possible help and commiseration, and not for affecting change. I'm sure it's frustrating for those here who are mistaken for MS representatives.

MS bears some of the responsibility for that -- don't name your peer-to-peer user forum answers.microsoft.com if it's not a place primarily for answers (mistaking experts for employees does happen at discussions.apple.com too, but at least Apple had the good sense to not use a misleading URL).

But (some of) the experts here should also know better than to suggest M365 for Windows solutions to M365 for Macintosh problems.

Also aggravating the situation are Mac solutions that don't specify in which version of the M365 apps those solutions are found. There's a video upthread showing the Enable Copilot checkbox in Settings > Copilot, but I just downloaded the latest updates from the Mac App Store, and that checkbox still doesn't exist. I assume this fix is in the direct-download version only (so far), but that's not specified.

Big picture: Everyone keep in mind you're dealing with fellow humans. Everyone keep in mind nobody here works for Microsoft (despite the misleading URL), let alone on the M365 team. And everyone here to serve as an expert, make sure you know what you're talking about before making suggestions.

What an ironic response from someone who chose to spend their time replying to multiple people in the same thread with the repetitive, judgmental, unhelpful, myopic, utterly pointless snark.

Users here have a right to be pissed off and vocal about this. Bloating out apps with AI features, putting those features on literally every line in a word-processing app, providing no way to opt out of those features, but publishing instructions for how to do so that don't even remotely resemble what's actually in the app -- all of this is worthy of being pissed off about, but all together it demonstrates a tone-deafness, ineptitude, and utter disregard for users.

This thread is a worthy discussion, and until this issue is fixed, the more noise users make about it, the better. I just hope everyone posting here is also contacting MS directly via feedback and chat, so Microsoft gets the message loud and clear.

Just be aware that the solution presented in that first video disables far more than Copilot. Further, it impacts features in all office programs, not only those in Word. The provider of that video doesn't bother to mention that. See this Microsoft Support article for details: Connected experiences in Office

Copilot is like almost every other tool in the software — just because it's there doesn't mean it has to be used. I'm not crazy about it either, but the feature is dormant unless a user chooses to take advantage of it. IMO Disabling Connected Experiences is like throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Do you know how stupid it is to be this complicated to turn something off?

It should just be... open Word > Preferences > CoPilot > deselect "Use Co-Pilot.'