is a senior editor and author of Notepad, who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years.
You’ve probably heard of vibe coding — novices writing apps by creating a simple AI prompt — but now Microsoft wants to introduce a similar thing for its Office apps. The software maker is launching a new Agent Mode in Excel and Word that can generate complex spreadsheets and documents with just a prompt. A new Office Agent in Copilot chat, powered by Anthropic models, is also launching today that can create PowerPoint presentations and Word documents from a “vibe working” chatbot.
“Today we’re bringing vibe working to Microsoft 365 Copilot with Agent Mode in Office apps and Office Agent in Copilot chat,” says Sumit Chauhan, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Office Product Group. “In the same way vibe coding has transformed software development, the latest reasoning models in Copilot unlock agentic productivity for Office artifacts.”
Agent Model in Excel and Word is a more powerful version of the Copilot experience that Microsoft has added to its Office apps. It’s designed to make the complex parts of Excel more accessible to users that aren’t experts. “It’s not just simple assistive short answers, but board-ready presentations or documents,” Chauhan says. “It’s work, quite frankly, that a first-year consultant would do, delivered in minutes.”
Agent Mode essentially takes a complex task and breaks it down with planning and reasoning that you can follow. It then uses OpenAI’s GPT-5 model to break down each step of document creation into an agentic task and execute it. It’s like watching an automated macro in real time, showing everything it’s doing in the sidebar.
Microsoft has taken a gradual approach to adding AI elements to Excel, particularly because the data it handles powers some of the most important parts of businesses worldwide. “[Agent Mode] lets you build sheets that are auditable, refreshable, and verifiable,” Chauhan says. “We have spent a ton of time making sure that the validation loop on all of these sub-agents is pretty tight.”
Microsoft says its Agent Mode in Excel has an accuracy rate of 57.2 percent in SpreadsheetBench, a benchmark for evaluating an AI model’s ability to edit real world spreadsheets. This result places Agent Mode above Shortcut.ai, ChatGPT agent with .xlsx support, and Claude Files Opus 4.1. It’s still behind the human accuracy of 71.3 percent, though.
Agent Mode in Word goes beyond the existing writing, rewrite, and summarization AI features in Word. “Agent Mode in Word turns document creation into vibe writing, an interactive, conversational experience,” Chauhan says. It lets Copilot draft content, suggest refinements, and clarify what elements are needed during the process of document creation.
You can do things like create a monthly report with data from previous months and have Copilot summarize the highlights for the month and the differences from a previous report. “Copilot makes suggestions to keep the process flowing, so writing feels more like a dialogue than a task,” Chauhan says.
Microsoft’s new Office Agent will also be available outside of its Office apps via Copilot chat. Powered by Anthropic models, it can create full PowerPoint presentations or Word documents from a chat prompt. “PowerPoint is one of the most used tools for creating presentations, but over the last two years AI has often fallen short when creating slides,” Chauhan says. “Office Agent changes that.”
Office Agent can create fully structured PowerPoint decks, all while doing web-based research and providing a live preview of slides. Microsoft is hoping that it will help Office continue to differentiate itself from the magnitude of AI tools that are also trying to create documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks.
“Productivity is our DNA, we’re Office,” Chauhan says. “While others will try to replicate us, there is no substitute for the real thing.”
Office Agent also marks another entry point for Anthropic AI models in Microsoft 365 apps and services. Microsoft already embraced the OpenAI rival to improve researcher, GitHub Copilot, and Copilot Studio recently, and now Anthropic’s AI models are able to produce Word and PowerPoint documents from Microsoft’s own Copilot chat interface.
”We are committed to OpenAI, but we are starting to explore with the model family to understand the strength that different models bring and understand how we build the best composition for our products,” Chauhan says. “We are looking at the entire family of models, wherever cutting edge work happens.”
While OpenAI models continue to power Microsoft’s AI work inside Office apps, it certainly feels like Anthropic’s models are inching closer to being a key part of Office apps like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Microsoft is using Anthropic’s API to bring these features to Copilot chat, which runs on cloud rival Amazon Web Services. That could be why we haven’t seen Anthropic’s AI models deeply woven into desktop Office apps yet.
Agent Mode in Copilot for Excel and Word will both be available today in the Frontier program for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers or Microsoft 365 Personal / Family subscribers. Agent Model in Excel and Word is only available in the web versions at launch, with desktop support coming soon. Office Agent is also available today in the Frontier program for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers or Microsoft 365 Personal / Family subscribers in the US.
