Beginning April 15, 2026, Microsoft will no longer incorporate Copilot Chat (basic) in Microsoft Office, Excel, OneNote, and PowerPoint apps. This change affects the online and desktop versions of these apps. 

The stand-alone Microsoft Copilot Chat remains accessible to the Cornell community.

Copilot Chat will Expand Capabilities in Microsoft Outlook. 

In contrast Copilot’s functionality within Outlook will grow; it will now have the ability to ask questions about your inbox, calendar, meetings and other limited data and take action directly in Outlook. Here are examples of the types of prompts you can use: 

• “Summarize my emails from the last week related to [project or customer name].” 
• “When is my next 1:1 meeting with /name?” 
• “Draft an email update summarizing the customer escalations from this week.” 
• “Schedule a meeting with my manager.” 
• “Flag all unread emails from my manager.” 
• “Setup an automatic reply for next Friday.” 

How to Keep Using Copilot with Office Documents 

You can still use the AI functionality of Copilot Chat to assist you with the tasks you currently use in the app-based Copilot. For example, to get feedback about the grammar content of a Word document, you can: 

1. Go to Copilot on the web (make sure you have signed in with your NetID to use it with Cornell’s protected status). 
2. Create your prompt. ("Review this document for grammatical issues, reading level, and suggest changes that would be appropriate for a document written for university research faculty"). 
3. Click the + symbol to Add Content. You can select “Work Content”, or you can upload from your computer or the cloud. Work Content will allow you to select a document stored in SharePoint or OneDrive. 
4. Hit enter and Copilot will act on the document you selected with your prompt.