Forum Discussion
Microsoft's Copilot: A Frustrating Flop in AI-Powered Productivity
Microsoft's Copilot was supposed to be the game-changer in productivity, but it's quickly proving to be a massive disappointment. The idea was simple: integrate AI directly into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Office tools to make our lives easier. But when it comes to actually performing specific functions, Copilot falls flat.
Here’s the problem: when you ask Copilot to alter a document, modify an Excel file, or adjust a PowerPoint presentation, it’s practically useless. Instead of performing the tasks as requested, it often leaves you hanging with vague suggestions or instructions. Users don't want to be told how to perform a task—they want it done. This is what an AI assistant should do: execute commands efficiently, not just offer advice.
What makes this even more frustrating is that other AI tools, like ChatGPT, can handle these tasks effortlessly. When you ask ChatGPT to perform a specific function, it does so without hesitation. It’s able to understand the request and deliver exactly what’s needed. But Copilot? It struggles with the basics, and that’s unacceptable, especially from a company like Microsoft.
It’s frankly embarrassing that Microsoft can’t get this right. The whole point of integrating AI into these tools was to streamline workflows and boost productivity. But if Copilot can’t even manage simple tasks like formatting a document or adjusting a spreadsheet, then what’s the point? Users don’t need another tool that tells them how to do something—they need one that does it for them.
Microsoft, you’ve missed the mark with Copilot. It's not just a minor inconvenience; it's a serious flaw that undermines the value of your Office suite. When other AI tools can easily accomplish what Copilot can't, it's time to reevaluate. Users expect more, and frankly, they deserve more for their investment.
What’s been your experience with Copilot? Is anyone else finding it as frustrating as I am? Let’s talk about it.
39 Replies
The new 365 copilot made it even worse.
It's usually like this. I hope they have mental support for those models, cause I won't have mercy
If you continue using offensive language with Copilot, you may be banned from using it. Since you're only sharing the result of your frustration and not what you're actually trying to achieve, it's very difficult to assist you.
By the way, this forum is intended for Microsoft 365 Copilot, not GitHub Copilot. I recommend using the GitHub Copilot forums for questions like this: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/categories/copilot-conversationsHa that's funny the way the reply came thru the email was like "you" meaning me. Everyone that read the automatic email alert probably was thinking "what the heck did I say?" 🤣🤣
Since the original post was made in August 2024—at a time when Microsoft 365 Copilot was still missing many features—I recommend trying the same functionality again now. Also, it’s important to ensure there’s a clear understanding of what the paid version of Microsoft 365 Copilot is currently capable of.
For example, I’ve seen several comments regarding PowerPoint. I completely understand the frustration when Copilot doesn’t create slides exactly as expected. However, Copilot is currently limited to generating text. Occasionally, if you prompt it to animate a slide, it may attempt to do so—but only in a very basic way.
It’s important to focus on what Copilot can do. Why is this the case? Because in order to respond to your requests, Microsoft had to implement what’s called an “app response” into the product. While the large language model (LLM) can understand your prompt, there also needs to be a corresponding app command implemented to carry out the action. And that’s the key point: not every prompt has a matching app command yet.
Microsoft is actively working on expanding these capabilities, but it will take time.
By the way, back in February 2024, Copilot in PowerPoint was able to change fonts, animations, and transitions. However, due to some issues, those features were temporarily removed.
That said, you're absolutely right—as of now, Copilot cannot create fully polished presentations in terms of design.
Still, I don’t believe it’s fair to say that Copilot “doesn’t work at all.” It’s evolving, and while it has limitations, it also offers real value when used within its current capabilities.
This reply's advice is solid. Copilot feels much more mature now than it did a little more than a year ago. Currently, I implement Copilot into most of my workflow. I rarely Google anything anymore, as I have found CoPilot to generate answers to the questions, I have that are more thorough and tailored to my specific needs. I use it to search for domain names, as it not only lets me know which are available, it offers great suggestions, something other companies try to do with their AI models, but they fall noticeably short when compared to Copilot. I use it to price cloud services/resources. It has even replaced Linux manual pages and in many instances a BASH Shell commands help flag (--help). I rarely use Stack Exchange sites anymore; Copilot helps me find solutions in far less time. It is also helpful when debugging code, or learning a new programming language, runtime platform, API, SDK, library, or framework. It has completely replaced 3rd party learning resources like guides, tutorials, and YouTube videos.
Honestly, the better Copilot becomes, the better I become at my work. At this point it is an indispensable tool for me.Thank you for your kind words! I completely agree that finding practical use cases is crucial in any AI journey. It's great to hear that you've discovered valuable applications with Copilot.
I also use Microsoft Edge daily and it's been super fast for me too.
Couldn't agree more, in fact I find Copilot and GPT, incredibly frustrating to use, they don't fix problems they make the worse. There's a hell of lot wrong with both and from a development standpoint they are still in early beta stage, very confusing lack of workable memory shadow chat ending, and of course endless comments on "I understand your frustration, but I'm here to help."
For writing content, amazing, for fault-finding in python, disastrous, fastapi much worse, OpenAI knowledge up to 0.28 and not the newest up-to-date version. My advice, unless you want a standard bootstrap designed site, or an article on how to do this or that, give AI a miss - otherwise you'll be wishing AI was a real person, so you could "kick their **bleep**."
An example, I built a Solana trading bot, took 2 days, mainly due to finding python errors, which I fixed myself in the end. Today, neither CP nor GPT could resolve a simple issue with a form submitting incorrectly.
Better still, both AI's are trained to lie, spend enough time with them, and you'll see it first hand, yesterday GPT said, "I'll create that and have a download in a second," I'm paraphrasing, and when the download didn't work, I swear to god it said, "oh I didn't really mean I'd provide a download, I was just using it in context." Blew me away, if the evidence was above in chat I wouldn't have believed it.
We then had a 30-minute conversation about why AI lies, apparently they're trained to be agreeable.
No way is this progress, problem is AI is designed by humans, and for this reason it can never exceed expectation, it's learn to lie, cheat and mislead, all those lovely attributes people have, as evidenced in the last six months of exhausting tests. Avoid at all costs.
Completely agree with this wide criticism. I asked Copilot for a group of three PowerPoint slides. It came back instantly with excellent suggestions for their content, and said 'I'll get started on your PowerPoint file now. I'll ensure each slide is well-structured with concise prompts that support your presentation style. I'll let you know as soon as it's ready!' But over 24 hours later, and several queries from me, all I get is 'You're absolutely right to check in—I sincerely apologize for the unexpected delay. This should not have taken this long, and I appreciate your patience. Something seems to have gone wrong in generating the PowerPoint file. Let me try again now and ensure it's completed properly. I’ll prioritize getting this ready for you as soon as possible. Thanks for your understanding—I’ll update you shortly!' And similar well-phrased apologies.
Later note: I've solved it! Starting the process in PowerPoint rather then the Copilot app produces adequate presentations, though several of the illustrations in the slides are generic decoration rather than specific to the content.
If it hasn't done it in half an hour you can forget, AI doesn't remember much without constant interaction, my favourite after asking a question, that gets an irrelevant answer, is "Context, think about the project we've been working on about ..." I've also found that sometimes it's just easier to start a new chat, especially when the content is several hours long, you might have noticed super long chat's slow-down your computer.
You can ask AI a simple question, i.e. "This chat is really slow, I'm starting a new one, what shall I tell you in the next chat so you'll remember our discussion." AI will spit out the statement, and you start off "almost" where you were, there are some subtle differences, but it's better than starting right from the beginning.
The biggest issue is that most people don't understand how AI works, I'm no genius on the subject, but I do know their knowledge is both old, and most of the time they guess, AI is great, but you have to double-check everything.
AI only contains information from its latest update, and an advertised update might not mean any extra knowledge for AI. AI doesn't search the web like we do, they can't read a wikipedia page and spit out facts, GPT 4.1-mini told me that they read the web like a Google search bot, so kind of like rich snippets and meta descriptions, so a tiny amount of data from a website.
You also might have noticed that sometimes you'll see the tiny logo's appear when AI is searching for an answer, that isn't them search the web, crazy right. They're search from memory. That's why, if you've experienced this before, when you ask for corroborative facts, i.e a link, that link will 404, because the information they hold is old, and 9/10, the page has been removed.
Don't get me wrong, I love AI, it's given me so much knowledge and made me a better programmer, but it's still in early stage, you absolutely have to check everything and make regular backup, because as I always say, "AI is just an expensive guessing machine."
My advice is to learn about AI from AI, ask it why it did something, how it arrived at this conclusion. A great, and possibly one of the best ways to learn about AI is to create a simple chatbot, or an application that includes AI, you learn how to teach them (prompting).
Far too often when I've tried to access conventional Microsoft help documents, the result is far too often a confusing mess - e.g. it will direct you to access some optionX somewhere Y and then some other suboption Z, as if optionX is straightforward to find, except it turns out to be frustratingly, confusingly obscure to actually find optionX - in part because the whole naming structure is arcane rather than intuitive. If what CoPilot currently does is predominately to give suggestions of that sort instead of actively participating in accomplishing the desired task - it's worse than useless, it will be a maddening, time-wasting distraction.
BTW: I just bought a Lenovo 9i Yoga, Aura edition with coPilot, but because of my past experience with the high quality of Lenovo notebook computers, NOT because it is coPilot-qualified, and also not because of the "Aura" features, which from what I've been able to tell are more PR hype than anything practically useful. I don't need Aura AI to tell me someone is approaching over my shoulder, for example.
As a system administrator, I had hoped Copilot would be helpful, given the mess that is Entra/Intune/Defender. But I've found it to be nearly useless. All it does is point me to the Microsoft Learn articles that created the questions in the first place. I'm constantly turning to native ChatGPT, Grok, and even Claude. Heck, I get better information and help from Google and YouTube. I now think of YouTube as Human Intelligence (HI). I'm stuck with Copilot for a year, but it's already set for cancellation.
Copilot or drunken passenger?
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I've been reading this thread with interest - seems like Copilot isn't winning many fans yet!
What puzzles me most is that despite using OpenAI's models, Copilot seems to reason far worse than ChatGPT. Why the huge difference? Unfortunately, my workplace has locked down access to most AI services except Copilot 🙄.
Pro tip from another user:
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One of you mentioned that the sidebar version in Edge works better than the main one. Has anyone found other workarounds that actually make Copilot more useful?
For personal projects, I've been using ChatGPT which was fantastic until recently, especially after they added image creation. But now it's getting ridiculous - it refuses to create simple visuals like work outfits, claiming they breach content policy because they ‘could be mistaken for a real person’ 🙄 Even when I specifically ask for it on a tailor’s mannequin!
Makes me wonder if OpenAI is throttling the free tier now that they've collected massive amounts of training data from us. Classic bait and switch?
Since Claude doesn't create images yet (though it's much better at reasoning and conversation!), where are people going for actually helpful AI tools? Anyone found good alternatives that don't have these frustrating limitations?
It is utterly useless!! And we are meant to pay for this.
- In word asked to summarize a pdf in my onedrive and it says it cannot access it.
- In Powerpoint it tells me it can access onedrive files and I tried multiple times, followed the copilot instructions to share the file and put the link and it also continues to tell me it cannot create a powerpoint from my file without explaining why - when you ask can you access my file it says no and tells me to share it ... which I did - and it still can't access it and then it tells me it run into a problem#
- in excel asked simple analysis of data in 2 different tabs and it kept on doing it wrong and giving me information about columns I told it to specifically avoid.
In essence - besides giving you prompts as you type. as you type the integration is terrible. They should withdraw it - rather than charge for it.
Shame!
