Remove copilot icon that appears when I click in Onenote

I've found success in removing the Copilot icons by reverting to an earlier version of OneNote, as outlined here:

"After updating Office to 2501, there will be an option in Word file—options to choose whether to enable Copilot. However, this option is currently only available in Word, and other applications such as Excel need to wait for subsequent updates.

If you really need to, we recommend that you restore your Microsoft 365 version to an earlier version, see the following:

• Restore Office version

1. Close all Office software, in the Start Menu, find "Command Prompt" (or "cmd"), right-click and select "Run as administrator"";
2. In the command prompt, type the following command and press Enter:

    cd %programfiles% \Common Files\microsoft shared\ClickToRun
   

3. Then type the following and press Enter

    Officec2rclient.exe /update user updatetoversion=16.0.17531.20120
   

This will restore Office to the stable version in February 2024."

Full response: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/copilot-icon-in-onenote/4caa13d5-b559-446a-8267-94bfc5e2da43

It's crazy that this is what's necessary to get around the obnoxiously invasive Copilot features, but it does work.

In one of my earlier posts, I said I had the option of reformatting my PC. I just wanted to report back after trying that. Unfortunately, there was no workflow that allowed me to prevent Copilot from installing in this way into OneNote, Word, etc.. I took every opportunity to suppress all “connected experiences” or whatever they say in Privacy Settings. I immediately uninstalled Copilot after the first boot up. Somehow it made it into my setup. To be clear, when I use OneNote, I see the Copilot icon and yellow banner at the top of the window reminding me of the settings I chose.

Since this was a fresh install, I figured why not try using New Outlook again. When I couldn’t reorder my accounts, I remembered why I had abandoned New Outlook previously and switched to Old Outlook (again). I share this because sometimes I honestly forget how frustrated I’ve been in the past. But the lesson here is that Microsoft’s handling of this Copilot roll-out is consistent with previous roll-outs. However, in this case, it is particularly unsettling how they are pushing Copilot within the app (icon + banner).

I say without a shred of pretense, I am receiving a loaner Mac on Friday of this week and will be trialing Mac OS for the first time in my life after over 30 years of using Windows. I have already begun trialing Linux on another laptop. Based on the number of comments in this thread, I suspect others are feeling similarly. Maybe in the past we’ve eaten our feelings and gone along with it, but this time Microsoft might “find out”, as they say.

Anyone remember Clippy...? The annoying "help" paperclip from the 90's? I think he's back in this new form.

Clippy was never that annoying. He stayed off to the side, and you could right click and turn them off... and they stayed off!

The Copilot junk is being forced on us without any way to even make it less annoying or to have it disabled! I had one machine where it wasn't showing up so I left it... but rolled back my other 2 to a version of office before it... and thinking I need to roll back even farther to completely get rid of it.

Removing copilot from the ribbon, disabling optional experiences in account privacy, and then following this worked for me to get rid of the inline Copilot icon. Unfortunately that doesn't return the ability to double-click next to a heading to expand/collapse it like OneNote did last week. So now all of my OneNote pages are extremely long - I use headings/outline structure EXTENSIVELY. Now each page is not much better than a watered down Word document in terms of navigation.

Start > Menu (all) > look for Copilot and hover over it > right mouse click > Uninstall > DONE or Settings > Apps >Installed Aps > Copilot > Uninstall > DONE