Forum Discussion
How do I turn off Copilot in Word documents?
username007
OK, I finally worked out how to get rid of Copilot in Word - at the moment, the only way seems to be to roll back Office to a previous version, but I also had to downgrade my 365 subscription to "Microsoft 365 Family Classic", ie the version which contains everything it used to (OneDrive, family sharing etc) but NOT Copilot.
Microsoft had kindly upgraded my subscription to "Microsoft 365 Family" at an extra $40 per year, just to give me Copilot, which I didn't ask for or want...
So the steps are as in the thread here: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-to-disable-or-remove-copilot-in-office-365/fc12cf79-3f93-4db9-8213-07ad13e16756
1) Uninstall 365
2) Follow the "unsubscribe" link on the 365 page to get the option to downgrade your subscription (sneaky to hide it behind the scary unsubscribe)...
3) Only after you've downgraded to "Microsoft 365 Family Classic", use the img download in the link above to get the previous version of Office.
(If you just downgrade your subscription without uninstalling, Copilot hangs around, presumably until your next payment, which for me was 10 months away)
4) I went into Word's option and chose "Never update" - this isn't ideal, but hopefully there will eventually be an option to turn this unwanted and expensive feature off with the latest version.
I have a family subscription, and when I went to cancel it because it's gone up $5 a month I saw that the classic family subscription, which is the old price, does not include AI! It's only $1 a month more than the 'personal' one. So it's an option for now. If they add AI, I'm done for good.
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any way to get my subscription back to the non-AI version, now that Microsoft upgraded it to the new 365 Family plan (without asking me).
I even just tried cancelling my subscription, but it's stay with the AI version until next August, as I've already paid.What you also need to do is, after downgrading the subscription to "classic", uninstall Office and reinstall it with your downgraded subscription in place.
My subscription doesn't even show as "Classic" after downgrading, as the downgrade presumably won't take effect until my next billing cycle in August 2025.
I've disabled recurring payments, I might have to leave Office 365 altogether in August, then re-subscribe with the Family Classic plan.This means I can't use the Web version of Word until next August, even though I've paid for it.
It was a convoluted process! I had to click through lots of stuff to get there, but I do pay monthly so perhaps that's why I could see it and you couldn't.
