Microsoft has steadily integrated the Copilot AI across its suite of products, including Office, OneDrive, and GitHub. But so far, the AI has only been able to take action within apps and files, but it couldn’t create them from scratch. That is finally changing.
This is pretty cool
Microsoft has announced that Copilot can now create files in multiple formats with natural language descriptions and export, as well. A similar feature was originally announced a month ago for Claude users, and was followed by news that Microsoft had inked a deal with Anhtropic to bring Claude within its ecosystem.
It seems that the deal is finally bearing its fruit. “Users can generate Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, or PowerPoint presentations and more directly from their Copilot session,” the company wrote in a blog post.
The capability is now rolling out to all Copilot users (version 1.25095.161.0 and higher) via the Microsoft Store, though you must have an account registered with the Insider testing program to check it out it. But now that it’s entered the beta testing phase, it should be released widely soon.
How does it work?
In order to create a document in the Office apps, users can either start from scratch or feed it data. For example, you can put a chart or numbers in the Copilot dialog box, and ask it to create an Excel sheet out of it. Here’s a preview of how Claude handles it already:
The export system also works in a similar fashion. A prompt like “Export this text to a Word document” should get the job done. This is a handy feature that lets users convert not just work-related data, but also personal notes, into something more organized.
In case the Copilot responses for a query exceed the 600 character mark, it will offer a “export button” that will let users directly export that response in a document format of their choice. For now, this capablity is offered for Word, PowerPoint, Excel, or PDF files, according to Microsoft.
