5 ms·
This looks bad for Microsoft. They added a Copilot button to all their products but it doesn't do much more than open a chat side panel. I recently tried Claud
by lateforwork 5mo ago
This looks bad for Microsoft. They added a Copilot button to all their products but it doesn't do much more than open a chat side panel.
I recently tried Claude Cowork for PowerPoint and I was stunned by the content as well as design quality of the deck it produced. That's a threat for Microsoft because now you don't need the editing tools of PowerPoint, AI replaces it, so all you need is the presentation mode of PowerPoint.
Copilot for Excel is useless. Ask it what is in cell A1 and it can't answer. I am looking forward to trying ChatGPT for Excel.
- screye 5mo agoIf AI winning means that data center companies win out, then the wins for Azure will more than make up for the death of Office. I am surprised that Microsoft's own copilot product is so far behind though.
- boringg 5mo agoAren't they providing a wrapper for the work of another company? IE msft isn't actually doing any foundational work thus they can't meaningfully move product capability, just wait for the model to improve and integrate it?
- bwat49 5mo agoits baffling how badly microsoft has handled copilot, this is exactly what copilot in office should have been
- miohtama 5mo agoIt's called Microslop for a reason.
- ebbi 5mo agoWe have many people in my wider team (Finance) that are AI skeptics purely because of their experience with Copilot. Like they don't know what AI is actually capable of when outside of the shackles of Copilot. Microsoft fumbled so badly here.
- watsonL1F7 5mo ago[dead]
- Handy-Man 5mo agoYou have to use the "agent" toggle for Copilot to behave the same way lol. Otherwise its pretty simple chat interface with the context, that's all.
- evanjrowley 5mo agoThere is a significant difference in experience between Copilot Basic for a M365 user whose IT admins have blocked integration capabilities with Sharepoint content vs Copilot Premium for a M365 user whose IT admins have allowed integration capabilities with Sharepoint content.
- interroboink 5mo agoA recent funny story on this topic: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-is-copilot-exactly https://idiallo.com/blog/what-is-copilot-exactly HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231
- mohamedkoubaa 5mo agoMicrosoft is better off not allowing copilot basic because of the reputational harm it will do. Not that they are thinking through copilot rationally
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- basch 5mo agoit was a good name when chosen. too bad they have burned bob, clippy, cortana, sydney, and copilot already.
- alternatex 5mo agoThe backend of Copilot is still called Sydney AFAIK
- compass_copium 5mo agoDon't forget Tay!
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- LuxBennu 5mo agoChatgpt for Excel is still an office add-in running in the same sandbox though. strongpigeon described the exact bottleneck upthread, process boundary crossings, context.sync() roundtrips that take seconds on web. That's a platform limitation, not a model limitation. Swapping AI behind the add-in doesn't fix the fundamental constraint that third-party add-ins can't deeply integrate with Excel's runtime the way a native feature can. If copilot is bad despite having more access to excel internals(I don't like how Copilot is designed or implemented tho), an add-in with less access is likely not be better.
- com2kid 5mo agoThere is an irony here that this would be more performant with a 2002 coding model. A native plugin, COM, OLE, whatever. C++, crash prone, but fast.
- strongpigeon 5mo agoMaybe but not drastically so. My guess is that most of the slowness comes from the tool calls round tripping+processing on Anthropic/OpenAI’s servers rather than the app latency. That’s without talking about the poor UI and security story of COM add-ins and the inability to run on Excel for iOS.
- angadsg 5mo agoWould love for you to try both copilot and ChatGPT for Excel. Agreed on the limitations - but in our experience, ChatGPT for Excel does really well on complex sheets.
- phyalow 5mo ago[flagged]
- nsiemsen 5mo agoClaude for excel is already amazing. Fully capable of doing junior work. Formatting is great. Can refactor large multi-tab spreadsheets. It just burns tokens. If OpenAI is going to subsidize this on the monthly enterprise plans for a while then it's a game changer. Claude for Excel (I work in finance) was one of the absolutely critical reasons we added Anthropic enterprise licenses. But they've turned out to be quite expensive ($100/day for heavy users). We'll see what OpenAI's quotas are.
- p_ing 5mo agoCheaper to get M365 Copilot licenses for the Claude models in Excel.
- WillAdams 5mo agoWhat are the costs on that? Does this remove (or at least increase) the upload limit?
- p_ing 5mo ago$200-something per user per year. Will vary based on license type and seat count. No limits.
- croes 5mo ago> No limits. Yet.
- codeugo 5mo agolol
- mastermage 5mo agoWell other than the limits of Copilots usefullness.
- jxmesth 5mo ago
- d3Xt3r 5mo ago> I recently tried Claude Cowork for PowerPoint and I was stunned by the content as well as design quality of the deck it produced. That's a threat for Microsoft because now you don't need the editing tools of PowerPoint, AI replaces it, so all you need is the presentation mode of PowerPoint. Actually, someone here posted a Claude Code skill recently that generates a presentation as a self-contained HTML5 file, so all you need is a browser. PowerPoint, as a whole, is doomed.
- jason_zig 5mo agoI'm not sure that's true - try getting someone to pull up an html5 file on their computer for a presentation...
- raincole 5mo agoYou mean like, double-click?
- apsurd 5mo agoyou must never have actually done this. it doesn't work the way you think it does. unless it's self contained (like a pp), you can't expect network access to actually deliver when you need it most.
- DrSAR 5mo agohrm, double-click and your browser does the rest. For added benefit, full screen? Until you need presenter notes or other niceties, this covers a large space of usage.
- vessenes 5mo agoMicrosoft has rights to all this IP. So, it might look bad for their product folks, but for the corporation this is great, to the extent it works.
- vipipiccf 5mo agoI've had the same experience. Copilot for Excel can't even parse basic cell references. Meanwhile Claude handles document formatting in one pass. The catch is it works externally, not inside the app, but at least it works. The MCP ecosystem is what makes this interesting. Claude isn't just a chat panel bolted onto existing software, it's building integrations that actually manipulate the files. Microsoft had the distribution advantage but they're losing on capability.
- chris_money202 5mo agostride.microsoft.com -> microsoft has this stuff you just don’t know it unless you are an M365 power user
- compass_copium 5mo agoI would consider myself an M365 power user and I was not aware of this. It is not well promoted--and after all the Copilot crap, I would be annoyed even if it was. Regardless, I just tried to log in with my work MS account, and I can't do so.
- chris_money202 5mo agoEnterprise is Copilot Cowork one of the frontier agents. Has to be enabled by your organization I believe
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Gareth321 5mo ago> They added a Copilot button to all their products but it doesn't do much more than open a chat side panel. I was hyped when I heard about Copilot. "I can tell it to make pivot tables now!" When I tried to use it I was shocked how underbaked it was. Below even my worst expectations. This really was someone shoving ChatGPT into Excel with almost zero additional effort. Copilot can't DO anything useful.
- chris_money202 5mo agostride.microsoft.com -> this is a virtual machine instance with developer tools that allow for same sort of work Claude cowork does. Copilot in excel has to access the excel document through excel provided APIs and can’t completely redo the document like cowork does everytime running developer scripts to generate it because the document instance is open. The model of work is entirely different.
- sarreph 5mo ago> This looks bad for Microsoft. Maybe(?) from a product catalogue perspective... But from a strategic perspective less so because they own ~27% of OpenAI.[0] [0] - https://openai.com/index/next-chapter-of-microsoft-openai-partnership/ https://openai.com/index/next-chapter-of-microsoft-openai-pa...
- ryanjshaw 5mo agoThere’s a magic button you have to press to make it integrate fully. Everybody is confused about why this isn’t the default behavior.
- chris_money202 5mo agostride.microsoft.com is the cowork equivalent I believe.
- p_ing 5mo agoOnly for personal accounts. Enterprise customers have a Frontier agent called Copilot Cowork via the M365 Copilot app.... copilot.
- xeyownt 5mo agoit would be bad for Microsoft if that would use Calc on LibreOffice.
- giancarlostoro 5mo agoI am still surprised that outside of open source AI models, Microsoft is just routing to external models, to a degree its kind of smart because they don't have to have all the skin in the game for the infrastructure, plus they sell some of the hosting anyway, but man. Why does Microsoft not have a frontier model yet? Would have been a great time any time in the last few years to introduce a real Cortana AI model.
- ebiester 5mo agoThey explicitly said they were ceding the frontier model game to others, and that they were content saying a few months behind the state of the art. In the long run, this is an interesting freeloader play that a few people are making. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/04/microsoft-ai-chief-sees-benefits-to-ai-models-that-are-months-behind.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/04/microsoft-ai-chief-sees-bene...
- leetharris 5mo agoI will say this in the most charitable terms I can. Microsoft simply does not have it in their culture to compete with something like this. Their prime days are over. They are slowly becoming IBM. They were completely correct to not compete in foundation models. They would have no chance. I mean, they can't even make a decent app or harness to use the other models!
- brookst 5mo agoPowerPoint is the poster child for the class of applications that AI totally obsoletes: * A large application whose outputs are independent of the all (people still print slides; when presenting nobody knows or cares what app was used) * Complicated and requires users to learn lots of skills unrelated to the work they’re doing (compare to Excel, where the model and calculations require and reflect domain knowledge about the data) * Practically zero value add in document / info management (compare to word where large documents benefit from structure and organization) We’re pretty close to presentations just being image files without layers and objects and smartart and all that. AI will come for all productivity tools, but PowerPoint will be the canary that gets snuffed first, and soon.
- HongKongPhooey 5mo agoI recall reading comments like this when PowerPoint was invented as it would kill all graphic design jobs. The absolute reverse happened. It created an entirely new industry. There is no AI today, or in the near future, that can combine human emotive story telling with impactful design, animated flow and interactivity. Yes it can create flattened boring 'documents' with no passion or depth. I for one would never want to be asked to stand in front of an audience and actually have to present a deck created by Copilot or Claude. Feast your eyes on this PowerPoint creation made by very talented real human designers and ask yourself the question "How long before AI can do this?" https://www.brightcarbon.com/portfolio/intersystems-partnership-highlights/ https://www.brightcarbon.com/portfolio/intersystems-partners...
- brookst 5mo agoWait, how does PowerPoint do emotive storytelling in a way that a human driving an AI tool could not? It sounds like you’re confusing my argument that AI can replace PowerPoint tools like gradient, layers, fonts, etc, with an argument I did not make that AI will take humans out of the equation.
- bko 5mo agoMaybe a dumb question, but why does Microsoft care? They should have good apps and if OpenAI or Claude wants to create plugins, great. That's what they're there for and Microsoft invested a lot of effort to make the new add-ins much more powerful and intuitive for this very reason. It's really nice experience compared to VBA. It obv makes Excel much more valuable and they can gatekeep by requiring the subscription for addins.
- Centigonal 5mo agoMicrosoft spent a lot of effort to develop a really powerful editing interface. If you can replace that interface with a text input box, then their applications moat becomes a lot shallower.
- brian-jones 5mo agoI run the Excel team at Microsoft. The experience you're describing sounds like it's from the earlier versions of Copilot in Excel that were genuinely limited. Today, Excel Copilot takes a model-forward approach where we give the models full access to Excel's capabilities. We give customers the choice of the latest models from both OpenAI and Anthropic, and we encourage the models to iteratively explore the spreadsheet before taking action. It builds a full understanding of the semantics and structure of the spreadsheet, find issues in it, and ultimately gives you much better results. Copilot can write formulas, build PivotTables, create charts, build multi-tab models, do multi-step analysis. The models are quite proficient at it, and they do a great job. We have an auto-mode which is the default where we pick the model for you, but you can also select specific models if you have a preference. I often see people switch between models to get the benefit of diverse perspectives, similar to how a diverse team approaches problems differently. If you tried it a few months ago and walked away, it's worth another look.
- dgsegesg 5mo agoCurrent model is inauthentically limited? "If you tried it a few months ago and walked away, it's worth another look." You shouldn't have shoved trash down people's throats a few months ago then?
- sqircles 5mo ago> You shouldn't have shoved trash down people's throats a few months ago then? :s/You/MS While I agree the widespread "race to market" with crap probably does and should hurt the success of these "AI-enabled apps," that particular area probably was not this individuals decision.
- shrdhdrhrdsh 5mo agoIt was this person's decision to mention their senior role at MS then dump marketing drivel into our heads. It's not his hand but he still eats with it.
- drc500free 5mo ago
- thesuperevil 5mo agoThat’s right lol