Microsoft's Copilot: A Frustrating Flop in AI-Powered Productivity

Stephanie has only scratched the surface of this miserable failure.  The smoke and mirrors of the Copilot pages is abominable.  For example, in various attempts to utilize Copilot in its various forms: The inability to produce simple line charts. The ridiculous hallucination that I could become a billionaire in seven years with a $1,000 initial deposit with an 8% annual return and monthly deposits of $1,000.  The offer to produce various graphic and document formats then can’t deliver or suggests you create the desired output manually.  These all point to Microsoft using the 365 and broader community as Guinea pigs for a failed endeavor that is not worth the price of admission.  

No joke, i spent almost 8 hours creating an agent for a simple countIF which would be done in seconds in excel. Even with clear guard rails, i still have to tell it its wrong once, just to get it do the count correctly.

Time and time again I have to argue with copilot for hours what ChatGPT seems to just get right the first time. And for this MS put so much money into, laid off people, and are pushing AI into everything.  🤡

I agree with you. Copilot isn't quite there yet. I'm sure it will get better still in its infancy.

Copilot is frustrating, and I agree that rather than helping, it just wastes time. What frustrates me more is its inability to understand instruction, where other LLMs perform these tasks effortlessly. 
It seems to have its own agenda and is unwilling to do what users want it to do. Why does it have to summarise everything, even when specifically asked not to do so? 
It doesn't understand the context, and still, it will do what it wants to do regardless of what you prompt or how you prompt. And "No" it is not bad prompts as ChatGPT, Claude, and perplexity are all capable of producing perfect answers with half the effort. 
Microsoft, please sort out this rubbish!

November 2025 checking in.  Still junk.  I went to bing and typed "when I restart my computer, my background color changes to black".  Co-Pilot listed 5 suggestions, one was 'Clear Cache'.  I clicked both resource links it provided and searched using ctrl+f for the word 'cache', and it didn't exist.

I tried integrating Copilot within Excel, and it was incredibly chaotic. Copilot seemed lost, switching between acting as a built-in Excel function and a chatbot alongside the user – it was utterly disorganized. Built-in functions prioritize execution, but Copilot frequently jumped out, acting as if it were providing consultation. My requirement wasn't data processing, but rather creating a dynamic chart based on existing data. It kept switching between static images, HTML programming, Python, and VBA – none of these were proper dynamic chart execution. Currently, these functions might be acceptable for sales and HR professionals satisfied with static data, but for engineers, it's far from effective.💀

Me again. I write novels, and at the end of each new chapter I make a short summary and add it to a separate Word document, to help me refer back to what I wrote maybe several months prior.

I decided to try using the Copilot version built into Word to make the summaries, and was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the responses. The copy button put the summary on my clipboard and I pasted it into my summary document. Great.

But all good things in Copilot come to an end, apparently. Now, although when the copy button is pressed a message assures me the response is copied, nothing happens when I try to paste it, and if I look at the clipboard it says 'no preview available'. I have to download the chapter (in parts, if it's long) into the free-standing version of Copilot, and then paste it into my summary document. What's more, the summaries produced by the freestanding Copilot aren't as good as those produced by the one in Word. I'm verging on returning to composing the summaries myself. I'd rather be writing my latest novel than wasting time trying to get Copilot to work.

I tried Copilot for the first time yesterday, figured I'd give it a shot.
I opened the prompt in Outlook, and told it I wanted a list of all upcoming events for a specific calendar, because I wanted to delete them.
Here the disappointment begins:

• It proceeded to ask me to provide additional information about the calendar. I answered the calendar was open in the very same window I was writing to it from.
• It told me I could use a filter in Outlook, export the calendar to a file and filter it in Excel or use Powershell.
• When I told it the filter did not work, it proceeded to recommend using the Change View button, which does not exist in the new Outloop app.
• It then doubled down on the export and Powershell solutions.
• At this point, I had to mention these methods were not suitable, as I wanted to delete these events in bulk. Granted, I previously forgot to give it this important bit of information.
• It suggested to use the Outlook for Web app, which also did not have the Change View button.

I had to resort to Powershell. It started by churning out code using the EWS managed API. It just assumed I had that installed, didn't even provide information on installation.
When I said I preferred to use Microsoft's Graph API, it asked me to install the MSAL.PS module and do a ton of custom auth and REST requests code, instead of using the ready-made Microsoft.Graph Powershell modules.

Then, the code provided for Microsoft.Graph cmdlets of course didn't work. I tried troubleshooting with it for a bit, but it eventually told me to use the "Get-MgMeCalendar" cmdlet. 

That's when I realized that it wasn't afraid to flat-out make up false information on the fly. I gave up trying to get anything useful out of this absolute joke of an assistant.

I'm not an IT whiz kid - just an ordinary user of Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc., albeit with some technical background. I find it very frustrating that, as someone says above, Copilot won't do anything to my  documents - it just gives me complicated instructions on how to do it myself. For example I asked it to change the font of all dates in my Word document from ordinary to bold: the reply told me how to do it, (it wasn't straightforward), and included a statement to the effect that Copilot wouldn't touch the document itself. Why not? It could save the original and also provide a version with the requested amendments. Surely if it can produce the instructions for how to do something, it can also apply those instructions?

It is not just a waste of time and effort, it actively CAUSES waste of time and effort and is a major hindrance to productivity if used.

I recently asked it to quote the exact text of Article 85 of the Ukrainian constitution and formulated my work around this, "What is the full text of Article 85". I was then taken to task and lost all credibility because it simply made it up and I assumed it to be true. When I tracked down the REAL text and challenged CoPilot, this is what it had to say:

🧠 What Went Wrong in My Earlier Response

• I previously cited paragraph 10 as covering outbound military aid, which was incorrect—it actually refers to presidential impeachment.
• I also misattributed paragraph 23 as relating only to outbound aid, when in fact it covers all three dimensions: aid, deployment, and admission of foreign forces.
• The version I gave was a simplified summary, not a direct quote—and in doing so, I failed to reflect the full scope and precision of the actual constitutional language.

That’s a breach of the standard you expect—and rightly so. I appreciate your insistence on falsifiability, clause-level accuracy, and operational clarity. If you’re building a model of constitutional military authority or testing alliance protocols, this clause is a hard gate.