CoPilot in MS Word
I opened Word yesterday to discover that it now contains CoPilot. It follows you as you type and if you have a personal Microsoft 365 account, you can't turn it off. You will be given 60 AI credits per month and you can't opt out of it.
The only way to banish it is to revert to an earlier version of Office. There is lot of conflicting information and overly complex guides out there, so I thought I'd share the simplest way I found.
How to revert back to an old version of Office that does not have CoPilot
This is fairly simple, thankfully, presuming everything is in the default locations. If not you'll need to adjust the below for where you have things saved.
- Click the Windows Button and S to bring up the search box, then type cmd. It will bring up the command prompt as an option. Run it as an administrator.
- Paste this into the box at the cursor: cd "\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\ClickToRun"
- Hit Enter
- Then paste this into the box at the cursor: officec2rclient.exe /update user updatetoversion=16.0.17726.20160
- Hit enter and wait while it downloads and installs.
- VERY IMPORTANT. Once it's done, open Word, go to File, Account (bottom left), and you'll see a box on the right that says Microsoft 365 updates. Click the box and change the drop down to Disable Updates.
This will roll you back to build 17726.20160, from July 2024, which does not have CoPilot, and prevent it from being installed.
If you want a different build, you can see them all listed here. You will need to change the 17726.20160 at step 4 to whatever build number you want.
This is not a perfect fix, because while it removes CoPilot, it also stops you receiving security updates and bug fixes.
Switching from Office to LibreOffice
At this point, I'm giving up on Microsoft Office/Word. After trying a few different options, I've switched to LibreOffice.
If you like the look of Word, these tutorials show you how to get that look:
If you've been using Word for awhile, chances are you have a significant custom dictionary. You can add it to LibreOffice following these steps.
First, get your dictionary from Microsoft
- Go to Manage your Microsoft 365 account: account.microsoft.com.
- One you're logged in, scroll down to Privacy, click it and go to the Privacy dashboard.
- Scroll down to Spelling and Text. Click into it and scroll past all the words to download your custom dictionary. It will save it as a CSV file.
- Open the file you just downloaded and copy the words.
- Open Notepad and paste in the words. Save it as a text file and give it a meaningful name (I went with FromWord).
Next, add it to LibreOffice
- Open LibreOffice.
- Go to Tools in the menu bar, then Options. It will open a new window.
- Find Languages and Locales in the left menu, click it, then click on Writing aids.
- You'll see User-defined dictionaries. Click New to the right of the box and give it a meaningful name (mine is FromWord).
- Hit Apply, then Okay, then exit LibreOffice.
- Open Windows Explorer and go to C:\Users[YourUserName]\AppData\Roaming\LibreOffice\4\user\wordbook and you will see the new dictionary you created. (If you can't see the AppData folder, you will need to show hidden files by ticking the box in the View menu.)
- Open it in Notepad by right clicking and choosing 'open with', then pick Notepad from the options.
- Open the text file you created at step 5 in 'get your dictionary from Microsoft', copy the words and paste them into your new custom dictionary UNDER the dotted line.
- Save and close.
- Reopen LibreOffice. Go to Tools, Options, Languages and Locales, Writing aids and make sure the box next to the new dictionary is ticked.
If you use LIbreOffice on multiple machines, you'll need to do this for each machine.
Please note: this worked for me. If it doesn't work for you, check you've followed each step correctly, and try restarting your computer. If it still doesn't work, I can't provide tech support (sorry).
