Remove copilot icon that appears when I click in Onenote

Feel better. I’m in the process of reformatting my PC so I can opt out of Copilot from the start and never opt in again (at least not outside of a virtual machine, container, or dual-boot environment). I have zero trust now that I have installed Copilot and can still see its icon sitting next to each line of text in OneNote.

Dear derMJ,

Good day!! Wish you a happy new year~

As per the description shared, I understand your concern and to my knowledge, I am sorry to convey that currently there is no possible setting or the feature in the OneNote application to hide or disable the Copilot icon beside the cursor, where we can only turn the complete Copilot feature from the OneNote app.

I agree with you on having the ability to hide or disable the Copilot icon beside the cursor in the Notebooks of the OneNote app will benefit the users and I suggest you add your valuable vote in the OneNote Feedback community: OneNote · Community which is the best place to share our ideas and improve the Microsoft products.

Our sincere apologies for the feature limitation in the OneNote app but being a moderator in this community we are limited with the resources and that's the reason we requested you add your valuable ideas as a feedback.

Appreciate your patience and understanding. Have a great day!!

Best Regards,

Sophia

Microsoft at its finest. Thank you, guys, for giving us such "flexible" options to customize your products to our preferences. Apparently, annoying users is less of a problem for you than shoving your Copilot down their throats. All I can do is send feedback (which basically means sending the user to hell).

That’s the thing. It doesn’t seem like you actually found a “solution“. I also disabled and uninstalled, and it still shows the Copilot icon in OneNote.

I hate to admit this, but there actually is a viable solution for me where I don’t have to stop using Windows after 3 decades of loyalty, and that is to reformat my computer.

EDIT- after reformatting and being careful not to activate Copilot, it activated anyway and now my OneNote shows the Copilot icon no matter what I do.

But here’s the deal. Going forward, I’m going to be using a dual boot or virtual machine so that I don’t have to expose my data to Windows beyond the absolute bare minimum. I hope and anticipate that over time I will use Windows less and less and just become a Linux user.

Lastly, though it seems I share your sentiment, I don’t want to come across as being abusive of Microsoft product managers and engineers. I understand everyone is in the middle of an AI craze. But they do deserve to know that Apple seems to be navigating this with much more sophistication and grace than Microsoft. I have much higher confidence that Apple is going to keep my data private. That isn’t because I know how their back end is architected, it’s because I can see Microsoft‘s commitment to opt-in policies reflected on my own computer.

I decided I wanted to experiment with copilot in Excel… so I enabled it (just for Excel, or so I thought)

I didn't even want to experiment! Excel gave me a warning for not having some online connections on and I clicked to fix it. The audacity of Microsoft to fool people into activating copilot! And now it seems I'm stuck with it. Already disabled it and then uninstalled it, but here we are. Unbelievable!

It was a terrible experience to try and find a solution. So much garbage marketing nonsense, so little help. Generating replies with AI does not help, either. The replies tend to be too long and repetitive when all we need is a short answer that fixes the problem.

I cannot believe you have coded something that runs on my computer even after I disabled and uninstalled it. Go fix it now.

I also uninstalled it and it's still there. I see why they call it a dingbat. UGH!