COPILOT PRO & COPILOT FOR MICROSOFT 365

Why Copilot is great, when it’s awful and which version you should buy

- Ian Betteridge, Tim Danton, Adam Timberley

AH, MICROSOFT. How we love your ability to create world-dominating software with one hand and sow world-beating confusion with the other. In January, finally, it announced that Copilot for Office was available for all. Except, this being Microsoft, calling it Copilot for Office would be too simple. Instead, we now have the free Copilot, Copilot Pro, and Copilot for Microsoft 365 (and Windows Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and a trio of Sales, Service, and Security Copilots, but let’s ignore these distractions).

Now, vanilla Copilot has nothing to do with Office. It’s the successor to Bing Chat and, unless you choose to download the Copilot apps for iOS and Android, you’ll access it via the web. As it’s based on GPT4 and GPT-4 Turbo, though, it remains a powerful tool, especially considering that Microsoft doesn’t charge a penny for it.

Copilot Pro, which costs $30 per month, is a different beast. If you already have a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription then a Copilot button inveigles its way into the main apps: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Office. However, let’s lay a big fat caveat here: it’s only for the desktop apps on Windows for now. Apple fans are restricted to web apps and iPadOS. As you’ll discover, this ‘it’s coming soon’ mantra is a recurring feature for Copilot Pro.