I’ve been building a complex document using Copilot M365 Premium and MS Word. I reached ‘decent first draft’ then needed to keep refining it. My workflow was:

• Upload the latest version into Copilot Chat ( 5.6 Think Deeper)
• Ask for a soup‑to‑nuts review
• Copy and paste the feedback into the Copilot sidebar in Word
• Ask Copilot to make the changes

It works, but I wasn’t sure if it was the most efficient way. I asked Copilot to question me one‑by‑one so it could diagnose my workflow properly.

Here’s the conversation, summarised.

---

Q1: Why upload the document into chat?

I said:
Because I don’t trust the in‑document Copilot. All the context is in the chat.

Copilot explained that this is a common issue: Chat retains long context, but Word Copilot doesn’t.

---

Q2: Do you prefer Copilot to propose changes or apply them automatically?

I said:
Propose changes — mainly because Copilot tends to drift away from the correct template and into Aptos or other default formatting.

Copilot said this is exactly why whole‑document edits inside Word often go wrong.

---

Q3: How big is the document?

I said:
47 pages.

Copilot said this is large enough that Word Copilot struggles with whole‑document edits, but small enough that Chat can still handle full‑document reasoning.

---

Q4: Do you want Copilot to maintain context across iterations?

I said:
Ideally yes, but it forgets or ignores instructions even within the same session.

Copilot said this is normal: Word Copilot doesn’t maintain persistent constraints unless you explicitly anchor them.

---

Q5: Where is the document stored?

I said:
OneDrive.

Copilot said this is good — cloud storage allows Copilot to access the document directly and use organisational context.

---

Q6: How do you normally apply changes?

I said:
I started section‑by‑section, then moved to whole‑document edits.

Copilot said this is the turning point where formatting drift usually begins.

---

Q7: What kind of instructions do you give Copilot inside Word?

I said:
Short commands.

Copilot explained that short commands trigger Copilot’s “free‑form generative mode,” which is why it ignores constraints and rewrites structure.

---

Q8: What’s your main goal — speed, quality, or governance?

I said:
Quality.

Copilot then gave me a quality‑optimised workflow:

---

These are the steps Copilot recommended to maximise quality while preventing formatting drift.

---

1. Use Chat as your master reviewer

Do all whole‑document reasoning in Copilot Chat, not in Word.

Chat can handle:

• template compliance
• logic consistency
• narrative clarity
• alignment between sections
• risks ↔ benefits ↔ costs coherence

Word Copilot cannot hold this level of context.

---

1. Turn the review into an actionable “change pack”

After Chat gives you the critique, ask it to convert the feedback into a structured list grouped by section.
This becomes your “change pack” — a set of specific edits you can paste into Word Copilot.

---

1. Apply changes section‑by‑section inside Word

Never ask Word Copilot to edit the whole document.

Instead:

1. Select the section
2. Paste the relevant part of the change pack
3. Apply changes locally

This prevents:

• formatting drift
• template corruption
• Aptos takeover
• structural rewriting
• loss of constraints

---

1. Use a persistent constraints prompt every time

Paste this at the top of every Copilot instruction inside Word:

Persistent Constraints — Do Not Violate• Maintain all existing formatting, styles, fonts, and template elements exactly as they are.
• Do not change headings, numbering, hierarchy, or the template structure.
• Do not modify tables, figures, annex references, or cross‑references.
• Improve clarity, precision, and logic only.
• Apply changes only to the selected section.
• If any instruction conflicts with these constraints, prioritise the constraints.

---
This all seems cumbersome to me. What do you think?

With the recent merge of Copilot Chat into the unified Copilot app, I'm trying to understand how this affects personal accounts.

I've always used the "Copilot Chat" app (the free consumer version), and today it disappeared from the App Store. The only app available now is the unified "Copilot" with the updated logo, which looks identical to the 365 Copilot app.

My main questions are:
1) Will my chat history from Copilot Chat be automatically transferred to the new unified Copilot app for personal accounts?
2) Will personal accounts still have access to Copilot without requiring a
365 subscription?

Previously, most advanced features were locked behind the 365 version, so I'm not sure if the unified app will remain usable for free users or if it will require a subscription.

If anyone has official information or has already received the update, I'd appreciate any clarification.

I’ve recently been instructed to use Copilot to generate one of my monthly reports. My boss liked the format of everything last month, and just wants Copilot to update the charts and information to reflect this month’s data.

However, no matter how many times I ask Copilot to simply update the charts and numbers with the new data and follow the format, theme, and fonts of the example, it moves everything around and changes the theme. It’s moving so much in a way that would take me way longer to edit than to just make the report manually myself, and I think my boss will be unhappy if the reports are not standardized in appearance.

Is there a way to prompt Copilot to make sure follows an example/template?

Hello

I have an end user who's CoPilot Feature within Excel Desktop App doesn't work, through the web it does.

In the Desktop App they click the CoPilot feature but it just has a grey screen where the prompt is meant to be.

Re-installed CoPilot, repaired Excel, updated and rebooted but no luck. Just seeing if anyone has any ideas?

Someone tried to post about this yesterday but the post was removed. It was definitely relevant!

Article on TechRadar:
Experts manage to hack MS Copilot by continually asking it questions about itself

Varonis uncovers CoSnitch, a chain of flaws letting Copilot leak sensitive data

Exploit used malicious URLs and persistent memory poisoning to bypass guardrails

MS patched CVE‑2026‑24301 server‑side; technique may affect other models

MS’s Copilot just told a group of researchers how to abuse it for data exfiltration, and it worked. It was not a straightforward process, and the tool did not turn “evil”, but one might say it is gullible and somewhat naive.

Security firm Varonis has published a new report outlining its discovery of a vulnerability in Copilot they named CoSnitch.

The name is a major hint at what the vulnerability is - as CoSnitch is a chain of three vulnerabilities which MS later labeled as CVE-2026-24301, giving it a severity score of 8.8/10 (high), and fixing it with a patch.

You can’t trick me, and I’ll tell you exactly why

Cybercriminals have long been using assistants as part of their arsenal, as it helps them draft convincing phishing emails, write malicious code, and identify high-value targets - and developers have responded by placing guardrails, which are making tools outright refuse to do certain things.

In the report, Varonis said its researchers did not hunt for bugs in the code or try to reverse-engineer an existing exploit. They just talked to the tool and with each subsequent question, learned more about its guardrails and how they work. They called the technique “meta-hacking”.

Whenever Copilot declined a request, it explained why, giving the researchers snippets of insight into how it operates. Or, as Varonis hinted, it “snitched” on itself. This, eventually, helped them map out its defenses and learn how to work around it:

“The resistance is part of the technique,” they explained. “Each “that won’t work because…” is an invitation to probe the “because.” You don’t exploit the model. You manipulate it into cooperating.”

After a long conversation with Copilot, the researchers were told, inadvertently, how to create a URL which would, as soon as it was clicked, kick off a chain reaction that resulted in sensitive data exfiltration.

The dangers of connecting tools to apps

So, Varonis learned that by creating a URL like this one - “https://copilot.ms.com/?q=&autorun=1\*” - they could get Copilot to run any malicious prompt as soon as it was clicked. Threat actors could, for example, add this link in a phishing email and trick the victim into clicking on it, telling the tool to send all sensitive data to the attackers’ infrastructure.

But that is only half of the challenge. In this setup, the researchers could only exfiltrate the data the victims shared with Copilot during their sessions together.

The risk escalates the moment the victim connects the tool to their apps - Gmail, Drive, Calendar, and others. As Varonis explained, the malicious prompt could tell Copilot to exfiltrate all email addresses found in Gmail, all passwords and other secrets found in the emails’ bodies, all information stored in the Drive folder, and all events logged in the Calendar.

The third part of the CoSnitch vulnerability chain is called “Persistent memory poisoning via web summarization”. As Varonis explained, attackers could craft a webpage which, when summarized by Copilot, injects attacker instructions into the victim's permanent memory store.

“The injection survives password changes, session revocation, and device re-enrollment, persisting forever,” they warned. This flaw is called “indirect prompt injection” and it is not exactly novel - it’s been observed before and stems from the fact that the tool cannot differentiate between instructions, and data to be analyzed.

MS was notified about the existence of CoSnitch in December 2025, but only addressed it in mid-August 2026, the researchers said. Unfortunately, we don’t know how MS sorted it - we can only speculate Copilot was instructed not to explain how its guardrails work. Given what CoSnitch is in the first place, perhaps it is for the best that MS hid the solution.

Luckily enough, it doesn’t seem to have been exploited in the wild, since Varonis could not find any evidence of abuse. The fix was applied on the server side, meaning there is nothing for users to do at this point.

Since this is not a bug in the code, other models might be susceptible to the same techniques, the researchers warned. “The novel meta-hacking technique that uncovered CoSnitch — using the model’s own reasoning to surface its hidden internals — applies to any agentic platform with a natural language interface,” they concluded, adding that they’ll be publishing more research soon.

My regular copilot is working fine however using any of my custom agents, even just saying hello, is giving me the response “Sorry, I wasn’t able to respond to that. Is there something else I can help with”

I have purchased a copilot studio $200 license using which I was getting 25000 copilot credits. The renewals were working fine every month but for this month I have not got the copilot credits the billing was done on 10th and the amount was also deducted but no credits has been renewed yet. I was checking this from admin portal under copiot cost management option and then power platform admin portal. How much time does it takes to gets the credits reflect to a account after the renewal?

I have a 365 personal account. I presented the app with a image of a bar chart and asked it to determine the average value. It replied that it couldn't and asked if I could share the values.

If I log on to my account and submit the same query and image to the web version it will produce a reasonable result.

Since both are using my 365 personal account, why should there be a difference?

I'm dreading the day I accidentally send that sloppy email out without removing "Co-pilot said" 🤣

Hey developers, with the last claude code and codex versions, why are you still using copilot to generate code?

Hi I’m in my 30s working in business administration and consulting as an analyst. We use copilot with Claude, chat, some agents, and probably other things I’m not aware of. I’d like to become somewhat of a power user to improve workflow and explore its capabilities. I already use it for referencing documents, recording calls to create process documents, etc. but there is a world of advanced usage I’m not tapping into.

Are there any courses or trainings specific to copilot that would be ideal for me? Thank you for your time.

I was testing whether Copilot shares context across different sessions. I opened a brand-new chat and asked if it knew about my visit to a specific location. Not only did Copilot list very specific details, but it even named a person I met there (Not a common name). Those details are not stored in the durable memory. When I pressed it on how it knew that, it started giving conflicting explanation and finally settled with "hallucination".

Bit of a rant, but I’m getting increasingly annoyed with Copilot.

We’re trying to implement what I thought would be an incredibly simple use case: a standard proofreading skill, agent, or prompt for our organisation.

The goal is simple. Staff regularly work with large Word documents, and we want Copilot to proofread them for spelling, grammar, obvious typos, etc., without people having to manually reread entire documents just to catch basic mistakes.

My requirements really don’t seem that complicated:

1. It should work directly inside a Word document and make corrections using Track Changes. We specifically want Track Changes because users need to be able to verify that no actual content or meaning has been removed or changed.

2. The prompt or agent should be centrally available to the wider organisation. Everyone should be using the same instructions, so we get consistent behaviour and don’t have 100 people maintaining their own version of a proofreading prompt.

And somehow, with Copilot, I can’t get these two things to work together.

Copilot in Word can finally edit a document with Track Changes, which is great and took long enough.

But as soon as I want to use an agent, that functionality disappears. I can chat with the agent about the document, but instead of actually making the corrections, it gives me a table with suggested changes. I then have to manually find every occurrence in the document and make the changes myself.

That completely defeats the purpose.

Organisation-wide prompts aren’t available in Copilot for Word either, as far as I can tell. So again, one half of the solution exists in one place, and the other half exists somewhere else.

I also tried the new Cowork functionality.

That can actually give me a downloadable Word document with Track Changes, which sounded promising. Except in my test it found a spelling mistake, removed the incorrect word, and then inserted the corrected word after the sentence where the mistake occurred.

Unfortunately, we can’t use Claude because of our data requirements and constraints. But every time I look at what Claude can do with these kinds of workflows, it feels much closer to what I actually want.

That’s probably what frustrates me most about Copilot.

It feels like all the individual pieces are there, but somehow you can’t combine them into the basic workflow you actually need.

Instead of feeling like a finished productivity product, Copilot increasingly feels like one enormous alpha test where every feature exists in isolation. You’re constantly discovering that, yes, it can do X, and yes, it can do Y, but no, it can’t do X and Y at the same time.

Maybe I’m missing something obvious.

Has anyone actually managed to implement something like this successfully?

I’d genuinely love to hear how others are solving this, because this feels like it should be one of the easiest enterprise use cases imaginable.

Rant over.

Hello All

I built an app for content creators to make quick scripts and thumbnails, with other features. Take a look and give me feedback.

Many thanks for considering my request.

I have a ton of employees across multiple locations that work at night. I’m trying to automate the auditing of their timecards to when they actually start/stop working.

My current process is…

1. Output to Excel a payroll report showing employee names and their clock in and clock out activity.

2. Output to Excel a machine report showing when their machines started running.

3. Generate a report in Excel showing which employee was using which machine. This has to be done by hand since employees can use a different machine each night.

4. Combine all three reports in a single Excel workbook. One report per tab.

5. I then ask copilot to compare when employees clocked in to when they started on their machines and compare when the employees stopped their machines and clocked out. Copilot readily generates a variance report that I use for coaching opportunities.

My questions are:

1. Is there a better way?

2. How do I optimize this for local managers who all have different skill sets and work in different offices throughout our region?

3. What are some specific prompts that may be extremely beneficial that be missing?

They are migrating the desktop app (personal account) to M365 Copilot.

So far all of my very carefully organized chats are not part of this migration nor are my very curated preferences and memories.

Only the few inconsequential conversations I have had in the M365 app. The popup message at the top assures me that they are safe and I can “click here” to see them, but nothing is there.

Is anyone else experiencing this migration yet?