Microsofts Copilot für Office ist eine Frechheit

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Microsoft Office hat jetzt KI-Funktionen: “Copilot” heißt das Ganze – und funktioniert hinten und vorne nicht. Wir haben den KI-Kopiloten getestet.

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► Kapitelmarker:
0:00 Intro
0:48 WERBUNG: NordVPN
1:47 Kompatibilität und Kosten
5:45 Word und KI
10:00 Powerpoint und KI
12:25 Excel und Outlook (fast) ohne KI
13:12 Fazit

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Look here, I’ll just type in Powerpoint, “Create a presentation about Raspberry Pi, Martin Luther and chocolate.” Yes, and then Powerpoint creates the presentation. Really with an animated intro video and stuff. It looks ok at first, but the content is completely stupid. “The trio in action: projector” – huh?

What does a projector have to do with the three things ? And what does Martin Luther have to do with the American presidents carved into a mountain ? Nobody knows. But: All Microsoft Office products now have such so-called Copilot AI functions.

We looked at them and looked for areas of application could actually be useful in everyday work . Have we found it? Stay tuned. Dear hackers, dear internet surfers, welcome here to… Yes, AI is all well and good, but did you know that you can get to Albania via VPN can tunnel

And then no longer get advertising on many websites? This video is sponsored by NordVPN and that’s how it works, you can also click your way to the USA and then order things there that aren’t available in this country.

Or watch other films and series on Netflix, for example; But you can also save money . Because: For things like flights, rental cars and hotels, the prices vary depending on the country in which the booking takes place. It’s worth trying it out.

And you can do that at NordVPN with a 30-day money back guarantee, and if you order via the link here, you get, exclusively, an additional 4 months on top of the two-year subscription , that’s https://nordvpn.com/ct3003. Ok, there are now AI functions in Microsoft Office, I think that

‘s a pretty big deal because Microsoft’s Office software is still the de facto standard when it comes to writing texts, creating presentations or spreadsheets . However, the whole thing is not automatic yet. It costs an extra 22 euros per month if you add it to your personal Office 365 subscription .

You can also book this for business accounts, but this is apparently only possible if you buy at least 300 licenses, i.e. only for larger companies. And the Copilot AI functions cost $30 per license, so at least $108,000 per year. Does this copilot have to create a lot of productivity?

Yes, let’s take a closer look. I have taken out a personal Office 365 Family subscription, which normally costs 99 euros per year, but you can try it out for free for a month. (Pro tip: Cancel it straight away, then you won’t forget the subscription and you can

Still use it for a month after canceling it.) On top of that, you then have to subscribe to Copilot Pro, for 22 euros per month. Only then will all of these AI functions be activated in the Office programs. On top of that, you get the Windows Copilot, which is also available

As a “Pro” version. The easiest way to access it is with copilot.microsoft.com, and you can see it in comparison. Here on the left without a subscription, on the right with. Yes, you see it says Copilot Pro. And the difference is clearly the speed, with all three options being creative, balanced or accurate.

With “Creative” you can also switch on GPT4 Turbo with Copilot Pro. That’s really quick. So, but this video isn’t supposed to be about Windows Copilot, but about Office Copilot. And you can get it, if you have taken out the 22 euro Copilot Pro subscription, in every safe way in the

Browser versions of the Office programs, i.e. at office.com. This also works on Macs or Linux computers. The AI ​​functions should actually also work with the standalone software variants under Windows, i.e. if you open Word as normal in the Windows start menu.

By the way, the standalone versions are the ones that, when you go to “File”, show a strange mess in the top right corner – and I always think that something is broken, but that is actually supposed to be decoration, namely “clouds”. You can also set other “decorations”.

Yes, so 1997 called and wants his window decorations back. Yes, and while this is only a visual problem with these cuddly clouds, there are unfortunately also more tangible problems with standalone Office and Copilot. We had really nasty problems with it on several computers.

There are two different types of Microsoft accounts, personal accounts and business and school or university accounts. It’s still the case that there are different Teams clients for these two types of accounts, which makes it unpleasantly complicated and annoying. The thing is, if your Windows somehow

Came into contact with a business or school account, there’s a good chance Office wants to get its license from there. But that’s stupid because we have the Copilot Pro subscription on our personal account and also the Office Family subscription. Yes, and at least we had the problem on several test computers that we

Couldn’t easily switch it over. So I had to completely reinstall Windows 11 so that Office would get the correct license so that Copilot could run. So, be warned if you want to try this out and you have a business Microsoft account running somewhere on the system.

By the way: The cloud versions work without any problems with Copilot, but the standalone versions are stressful. So now everything is working here and let’s start with Word. You can see that Copilot is active when you see a blue “Copilot” icon under “Start” on the right .

And in addition, when you start a new document in Word, there is an icon next to the cursor. You can then use it directly to generate text. So I type, “write a poem.” Copilot then starts writing something directly into Word; even with a heading, with larger text, so there is also automatic formatting.

You can then write change requests in this field here; and then use this to switch back and forth between the different variants. Microsoft clearly took inspiration from Adobe Photoshop, as this AI bar looks and works almost exactly the same. Oh well. Unfortunately, the content is often not what you want it to be.

For example, here I said that the poem should rhyme. Yes, but it doesn’t rhyme at all. And here when I tried this again, there are at least a few rhymes: stomach, struck, cocoa tree, dream; but that’s not Goethe. As soon as you click “Keep”, the individual text versions are gone for clicking through.

If you mark the block again and then go to the “Copilot” icon, the only options are : “Rewrite” and “Visualize as a table”. So I can no longer type in specific wishes like I did at the very beginning, but can simply have them “rewritten” in a completely vague way.

If I do that, yes, then it will be rewritten somehow and then I can choose between “Neutral”, “Professional”, “Informal”, “Concise” and “Imaginative” . And that often doesn’t work. Then you get an error message when you click on it. If you try exactly the same thing again, sometimes it works. Or

Rather halfway through, here he only stopped halfway through the text. But what really stuck out in our tests was that Word constantly didn’t want to do something. This “Visualize as a table” is really absurd. So this can make sense in very rare cases, but often Copilot simply refuses to

Click on it or something like this comes out. By the way, that’s the paragraph I just told here. “Feature Copilot”, “Rewrite Feature”, advantages, disadvantages, huh? So that just doesn’t make sense. If you don’t want to interact with the text so directly, you can

Click on the large copilot icon at the top instead of the icon in the text field. Then this opens up to the right like this. And then you can interact with the text more holistically. So here, for example, I have summarized this script. That always takes a while, at least you can

Continue working on the left while the co-pilot is messing around on the right. But this fold-out copilot doesn’t work reliably either. For example, he says something here about a raffle. But that’s not in the text at all, it was in an old version that I deleted long ago .

So the assistant is lying. If you copy-paste something into the text field and want to get the summary straight away, that often doesn’t work. You then have to wait an indefinite amount of time until Copilot registers the text. What you should also be able to do with this fold-out copilot:

Make holistic changes to the text. But for example, if I type: always put the number “3003” in bold, then it just comes out as a weird half-English mishmash like you can get Word itself to do. So it’s more of a Karl bracket-like help function. You want the co-pilot to do things himself.

But that only works very rarely. The stupid thing is that you don’t know: Can’t he do that in general, or am I just giving inaccurate information and have to word it differently? Hmmm. What definitely works well: If you phrase it very sloppily, something like: “Then

The woman went into this store and looked around and then she bought a belt that reminded her of her brother when she was three years old and then she was a little sad and then she bought a cake because that sometimes helps

When you’re sad because of sugar and then it went again and then she rode her bike to work in the elevator.” So stylistically very bad. Then I simply asked in the sidebar: Rewrite this so that it reads more literary. And yes, that works. “The woman entered the store and let her gaze wander.”

So definitely better, but you could have had it for free with ChatGPT or Bing Chat or Google Gemini. But what is really only possible with Copilot: Automatic presentations with Powerpoint. I said here in the Word Copilot: “Can you

Make a presentation out of the text with the woman” and then there was a text summary of what should be shown on the individual slides . Unfortunately, Copilot does not work across software, which means you first have to start Powerpoint

And then say in Powerpoint Copilot: Create a presentation and then paste the text created by Word Copilot into it. And then this comes out: The story of a woman Buying a belt Enjoying a cake Cycling ride And that’s actually quite impressive because it really looks like a real Powerpoint presentation.

By the way, the co-pilot got the pictures from Powerpoint’s own stock photo database ; they are not AI-generated. Yes, and I had a number of such presentations made. For example, one with the strangest and most unusual attractions in Hanover.

In the end, unfortunately, these were just the standard tourist attractions; Above all, the pictures did n’t fit at all. So the aerial photo on the starting foil was ok, that’s really Hanover, but everyone else, hmm. I tried the same thing with New York City, maybe Microsoft is

Closer to that; and yes, the attractions are definitely more unusual, but a) some don’t exist or no longer exist like the KGB Museum. And b) the pictures here are completely wrong, the Jeffreys Hook lighthouse doesn’t look like this, but like this.

Well, I have to say that I actually find this function very practical in theory, because sometimes I have to build Powerpoint presentations and I don’t really enjoy it. I think more in text than in images and would therefore like it if I wrote down what

I want to say in the presentation in Word and the co-pilot then makes a presentation out of it. With pictures and everything. Unfortunately, it was often so unreliable in our tests that, at least for me doesn’t make sense yet. For example, I had this script summarized here from this video as a presentation

, which looks like this: So first of all, all the criticism that was undoubtedly in the script is no longer there. And: There are things that I definitely didn’t write into the script. So “AI can help create accessible documents”. Or “Copilot is available on a monthly and annual basis”.

That may be true, but it’s not in the script. And in general, this presentation is so superficial that it has nothing to do with my text. But maybe Excel justifies the 22 euros per month. Spoiler: No. The thing is completely English, so you can’t prompt in German.

And it just kept spitting out error messages for me. The only thing I managed to do was to redesign this table graphically. But unfortunately nothing else. And Excel is now where I would like an AI because I ‘m not an Excel professional and I often reach my limits there.

I would like to simply say: Please add up all the numbers here, then convert them from dollars to euros and write down the result. But unfortunately that didn’t work yet. Yes, speaking of which didn’t work: Copilot Pro is also supposed to help in Outlook, namely

Grouping emails, but the Copilot button was simply missing for me, so I could n’t test that either. My conclusion To be honest: Copilot Pro for Office in its current version is a joke. We’re not talking about a small startup that’s tinkering a bit with AI,

We’re talking about one of the largest companies in the world that sells a product for 22 euros a month that is, at best, an early beta. Starting with the problems that arise when you use a professional Microsoft account on the system, to the strange German-English language mix and of course

The many errors in content that the copilot makes. And of course, current AI technology with large language models generally tends to cause hallucinations, but it is already technically possible today to summarize a short text without hallucinating any content that is not there. That works.

So, in my opinion, the product that exists today is not yet useful ; or you can do the useful things with free offers, for example rewriting a poorly worded text. But: There is a lot of potential in the idea of ​​using Office via AI.

So just being able to turn a text in Word into a Powerpoint presentation. Or using Excel with natural language instead of formulas. I trust Microsoft to get there at some point; and then you can also collect money for the subscription as far as I’m concerned, but today? Difficult.

And even though I find some things quite practical, this wave of computer-generated content is of course also problematic. So, I’m glad I’m not a teacher. The only Powerpoint presentation generated that wasn’t completely stupid in terms of content was a

Typical school assignment: “Create a presentation about the character of the drum major in Woyzeck” – that was ok. So what actually happens if these AI things just become standard functionality in Office? I’m already annoyed by AI-generated texts and images, it’s definitely not going to get any better

In the future; and I won’t open the data protection barrel at all. Well, maybe there will be a renaissance of handmade things, who knows? how do you see it? Feel free to write in the comments! And of course subscribe to this channel and the 3003 hype newsletter! Link is in the description! Bye!