Did you recently launch Excel only to find yet another Copilot icon shoved into your face? This time it’s a permanent icon in the lower right of every worksheet.
There is no option to disable, hide or remove it. Googling suggests there is supposed to be a copilot setting in Excel under File / Options but I don’t have that and nor did many others I found online. Disabling “Connected Experiences” was supposed to disable it as well but that doesn’t work. I’m a Microsoft 365 Global Admin for our tenant so I went even further and stripped out all Copilot licensing from my own user and manually enabled the GPO for “Turn off Copilot”. None of this worked for Excel build 2604 16.0.19929.20136 64 Bit.
Microsoft, it’s not our fault you’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a service that continues to have dubious value. Every attempt to use the product calls out that it “may” produce incorrect content. “May” is doing some heavy lifting in my experience to put it kindly.
Ok, enough of my soapbox. How do you remove the Copilot icon from Excel? After much digging I found a Github project called RemoveWindowsAI by Zoicware. The link to the project is below:
Windows AI Removal Tool: https://github.com/zoicware/RemoveWindowsAI/
It’s basically a Powershell script that purports to remove all the AI components from Windows. The script was last updated only a few hours ago based on the publication date of this post so it appears well maintained.
The author also has a Youtube video as well that not only goes over how to use the tool but also reviews several other similar tools and why they are “garbage”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5_eEBWGHFw
Obviously running any random Powershell code from the Internet is something to be done with caution but also with how impossible Microsoft makes it to remove this crap through any official channels, I don’t know there is much of an alternative approach. If anything, I’m grateful people like this exist to figure out this stuff.
I ran the script, rebooted, launched Excel and low and behold, the Copilot icon was gone!
If I later discover this script borked my system or stole all my data or something, I’ll provide an update but at this point I feel generally confident.
Hope this helps.
This is amazing! Thank you so much for sharing. I’m sure many other folks will appreciate this.