Microsoft giveth and Microsoft taketh away: Copilot edition

Office documents in Copilot? Absolutely! Using Copilot to make Outlook themes? Nah…

Not satisfied with shoehorning Copilot into every crevice of Office, Microsoft is adding Office to the Copilot app, while also evicting the AI assistant from certain parts of Outlook.

The plan is simple: give the Copilot app a prompt, and it will create an Office document (for example, Word) and let a user edit it in the appropriate Office application while keeping the Copilot conversation going.

The document can be shared with other users too, who can use the prompt Copilot to tweak it.

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Albeit an interesting approach, we suspect the system's reliance on OneDrive, rather than that enterprise favorite, SharePoint, might put off some customers. The new feature is also only rolling out to Frontier customers in Chat and Cowork.

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There's also a question-mark over Microsoft's commitment. The company is quick to drop or deprecate technology when its attention drifts elsewhere. The ability to create a theme in Outlook with Copilot is an example.

Less than two years ago, Microsoft announced "Themes by Copilot in Outlook" which, according to the software and cloud biz, marked "the first instance of dynamic AI-generated theming in productivity applications."

Themes by Copilot in Outlook, for users with a Copilot license, was a relatively simple piece of technology and could be dynamic, showing imagery inspired by the user's locale (if location permissions were enabled) and updating at regular intervals, for example, based on the current weather.

It was all terribly exciting, and Microsoft imagined a world where users might fiddle with their productivity applications in the same way that "you might accent your desk with a candle or photos, spruce up your office with artwork or plants."

After all, what's better than watching a beautiful sunset while Outlook quietly explodes in the background?

However, after less than two years, the feature is for the chop, according to a post in Microsoft's Message Center. "Themes by Copilot," it wrote at the weekend, "will be removed from Settings, and users will no longer be able to select or return to a Theme by Copilot after changing to a different theme."

If you're currently using a Theme by Copilot, it won't go anywhere until you change it, but after that, there's no going back.

It's unclear why Microsoft is retiring the feature so soon after announcing it. It might be due to low usage (we can imagine some administrators weren't happy that users could override the selected appearance of their tools) or a step back from the Copilot All The Things approach Microsoft has taken in recent years.

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It is, however, a salutary warning for anyone enthusiastically embracing Office in Copilot, an interesting feature that will make for some impressive keynotes. It will also need to demonstrate its worth or face the same fate as Themes by Copilot when Microsoft moves on to The Next Big Thing. ®