Forum Discussion
Copilot not creating new documents
Hi
I'm hoping someone can help. My company has just invested in Copilot for my team on my request and some of the functions it purports to have don't seem to work.
When I ask it to create new word documents from a template, it tells me it is generating the documents but never actually does. Similarly, when I ask it to copy information from a word document and paste it into a spreadsheet, it tells me it has done it but hasn't.
Has anyone else experienced this or know a fix for it? If it can't actually do this and create one document based on another document then its usefulness to me is vastly reduced.
Thanks
Hello - M365 Copilot currently doesn't honor Word templates. You can open a new Word doc, refer to a few files and ask it combine, summarize, or compare. You can open a populated Word document and ask it to change a few key areas, so if it were a SOW, you can ask it to change client name, effective date, deliverables etc., but it won't honor the formatting of the original doc. The only templates that can currently be used are in PowerPoint - and that requires specific master slides. And Copilot won't copy/paste from one file to another - Copilot won't take Word content and place it in Excel. M365 Copilot in Excel only works in the one Excel file you have open with data that already exists - at least for now. Microsoft support has some good intros on what you can do with Copilot and Office: Get started with Copilot in Excel - Microsoft Support I hope this helps.
Hi Kelly,
Thanks for taking the time to respond, it's much appreciated. I would've been happy with it creating a blank document rather than using a template to be fair, but it sounds like it sadly can't do that either. I was not aware it didn't support templates in Word, I've used them in Powerpoint, so that's useful to know.
I have been through those guides already but they not especially extensive and I guess I'm trying to push the boundaries to try to create a completely automated workflow. I've had it pull information from a proposal and create a presentation from it, therefore it didn't seem like a big ask for Copilot to pull info from one document and into Excel. That makes sense that it works purely inside the spreadsheet you're working on.
Thanks again
I'm a new user of copilot. I rely heavily on Word, Excel, PPT and Outlook. I plan to learn how to use copilot for all of these. Today, I successfully asked copilot to generate new Word documents and PowerPoint presentations however, when I asked for a new Excel spreadsheet to be created, copilot gave me step by step instructions to create it myself but didn't do it for me. I tried different wordings but couldn't get it done. Is this to be expected?
