Microsoft is introducing a new Agent Mode in Office (Excel and Word), which can create complex spreadsheets and documents with just a command. A new Office Agent in Copilot chat, powered by Anthropic models, is also launching today and can create PowerPoint presentations and Word documents from a chatbot 'vibe working'.
“Today we’re bringing vibe working to Microsoft 365 Copilot with Agent Mode in Office apps and Office Agent in Copilot chat,” said Sumit Chauhan, Microsoft vice president of the Office Product Group. “In the same way that vibe coding has transformed software development, the latest reasoning models in Copilot unlock agentic productivity for Office artifacts.”
Agent Mode 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 non-expert users. “It’s not just quick answers, it’s board-ready presentations or documents,” Chauhan says. “It’s work that a first-year consultant would do, delivered in minutes.”
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Agent Mode essentially takes a complex task and breaks it down into a design and logic you can follow . It then uses OpenAI’s model GPT-5 to break down each step of document creation into a practical task and execute it. It’s like watching an automated macro in real time, seeing everything it does in the sidebar.
Vibe working: Agent Mode in Excel
Microsoft has taken a gradual approach to adding AI to Excel, especially because the data it handles underpins some of the most important parts of the world’s businesses. “Agent Mode allows you to create sheets that are auditable, updatable and verifiable,” says Chauhan. “We’ve spent a lot of time making sure that the validation cycle across all these sub-agents is pretty tight.”
Microsoft says that Agent Mode in Excel has an accuracy rate of 57.2% on SpreadsheetBench, a benchmark for evaluating an AI model's ability to process real spreadsheets. This score puts Agent Mode above Shortcut.ai, the ChatGPT agent with .xlsx support, and Claude Files Opus 4.1. However, it still falls behind the human accuracy of 71.3%.
Vibe working: Agent Mode in Excel
Agent Mode in Word goes beyond existing AI writing, rewriting, and summarizing capabilities in Word. “Agent Mode turns document creation into vibe writing, an interactive, conversational experience,” says Chauhan. It allows Copilot to draft content, suggest improvements, and clarify what elements are needed during the document creation process.
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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 that writing feels more like a dialogue than a task,” says Chauhan.
Microsoft’s new Office Agent will also be available outside of Office apps via Copilot chat. Powered by Anthropic models, it can create full PowerPoint or Word documents from a chat prompt. “PowerPoint is one of the most widely used tools for creating presentations, but over the past couple of years, AI has often failed at creating slides,” Chauhan says. “Office Agent changes that.”
Office Agent can create fully structured PowerPoint decks, while also doing web research and providing a live preview of the slides. Microsoft hopes this will help Office continue to differentiate itself from other AI tools that also try to create documents, spreadsheets, and slides.
“Productivity is in our DNA, we are The Office,” says Chauhan. “While others will try to copy us, there is no substitute for the real thing.”
Emphasis on artificial intelligence
Office Agent also marks another entry point for Anthropic into Microsoft 365 apps and services. Microsoft has already tapped competitor OpenAI to improve GitHub Copilot and more recently Copilot Studio. Now Anthropic’s AI models are able to produce Word and PowerPoint documents from within Microsoft’s own Copilot chat interface.
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“We are committed to OpenAI, but we are starting to explore the model family to understand the power that different models bring and understand how we create the best composition for our products,” Chauhan says. “We are looking at the entire model family, wherever groundbreaking work is happening.”
While OpenAI models continue to power Microsoft's AI work within Office apps, it certainly seems like Anthropic's models are getting closer and closer to becoming a core part of Office apps, like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
Agent Mode in Copilot for Excel and Word will be available today in the Frontier for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers or Microsoft 365 Personal/Family subscribers. Agent Mode in Excel and Word is only available in the web versions at launch, with desktop support coming soon.
