How to disable the Microsoft Office 365 Word CoPilot Summary

Question

How to disable the Microsoft Office 365 Word CoPilot Summary

McNamara, Brian 20

When any Word document is opened CoPilot is generating a Summary of the document at the top of the document.

This is highly annoying and unwanted. There appears to be no way of disabling this feature.

CoPilot is enable by corporate policy and cannot be disabled.

Is there a way to disable the document Summary feature of CoPilot?

Locked Question. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments

3 answers

Answer 1

Hotchkiss, Colin 5

Seriously? There's no way to disable unwanted intrusions that delay functionality?

Sara Adel Mohammad 0 Reputation points

2026-10-09T21:59:06.8633333+00:00

The Copilot summary placement is terrible and intrusive. Forcing users to see it without an option to disable or remove it is unacceptable especially when it's an account controlled by the company which doesnt show the copilot option in the options tab. AI features should be optional, not forced.
Stefan Blom 353.9K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator

2026-10-10T14:10:35.1333333+00:00

Colin, Sara

In a business environment, users often have limited control over settings. You will have to take this up with IT support in your respective organizations.

On the other hand, if you have individual subscriptions, turn off Copilot via File > Options > Copilot in Word.

If you want to continue the discussion with your fellow users in Q&A, please start your own threads. Click Ask a question. If you also want to send feedback to Microsoft, do so via the Feedback portal at https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/forum/fb6d67e3-301c-ec11-b6e7-0022481f8472 . Good luck.

The current thread is old and it will be closed.

Answer 2

Hi @McNamara, Brian,

Welcome to the Microsoft Q&A forum.

I understand that the appearance of a Copilot summary panel in Word may make you feel uncomfortable.

However, due to your company’s policy, disabling Copilot is not permitted. Therefore, you will not be able to completely disable the Copilot summary feature in Word.

If you have any questions or need further assistance, please feel free to share them in the comments on this post so I can continue to support you.

I look forward to continuing the conversation.

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.

Answer 3

The automatic Copilot summary that appears at the top of Word documents is part of the “automatic summary of documents on file-open in Word” feature. There is currently no separate end‑user control to turn off only the summary while keeping Copilot enabled.

Available options from the documented behavior:

Feature behavior
- When a document is opened, Copilot generates a summary in the Word window. Users can hide the summary for that document or open the Copilot chat pane to ask questions about the document, but the feature itself is on by design when Copilot is available and enabled.
Turning off Copilot per app (if not blocked by policy)
- Word on Windows and Mac has an Enable Copilot checkbox per app and per device. Clearing this checkbox turns off Copilot in that app on that device. However, in this scenario Copilot is enforced by corporate policy, so this control is not available to the user.
Turning off Copilot via privacy settings (if allowed by the organization)
- On Windows devices, Copilot and other content-analyzing features can be disabled by clearing Turn on experiences that analyze your content under File > Account > Account Privacy > Manage Settings. This change applies across the Office apps on that device.
- On Mac devices, the equivalent is in Word > Preferences > Personal Settings > Privacy > Connected Experiences > Manage Connected Experiences, then clear Turn on experiences that analyze your content.
- In this case, these settings may also be locked by corporate policy; if so, they cannot be changed by the user.
What can be done in a corporate-managed environment
- Because Copilot is explicitly enabled and enforced by corporate policy, disabling only the Word summary experience is not supported at the user level.
- The only viable path is to work with the Microsoft 365 administrator:
  - The admin can review Copilot and privacy policies and decide whether to disable Copilot or connected experiences for Word (which would also affect other Copilot capabilities).
  - If the organization wants Copilot but not this behavior, the admin must monitor Microsoft 365 Copilot release notes and configuration options as they evolve; currently, the documentation only exposes app-level and privacy-level controls, not a dedicated “disable summaries on open” toggle.

In summary, with Copilot mandated by corporate policy there is no documented way to disable just the automatic document summary in Word. Any change would need to be made centrally by the Microsoft 365 admin, either by disabling Copilot for Word or by turning off content-analyzing connected experiences, if allowed by organizational requirements.

References: