Microsoft’s Copilot obsession strikes again when sharing Word documents - but it could actually be useful

Now I never have to read a full document again!

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A new feature is coming toMicrosoftWord for people usingMicrosoft CopilotforMicrosoft 365. It will soon allow users to add an AI-generated summary to their documents when sharing them via OneDrive.

Microsoft’s file-hosting service is widely used within businesses and by consumers to allow people to share documents, large files, and presentations straight from the Microsoft 365office softwaresuite. According toMSPowerser, the feature will be exclusively available to users with Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, for which you need a specific paid license (unlike OneDrive itself).

While this might be disappointing for those who wish to try the feature out without having to pay for it, there is some hope that we may see it trickle down to Microsoft’s free Office for Web suite (formerly known as Office Online), which includes Microsoft Word and 5GB of OneDrivecloud storage.

Quick and Easy

It may seem like quite a basic addition toCopilot’s nifty AI-powered skill set, but the new feature can be very helpful. If you work in an industry where you’re bombarded with new documents from different people every day, for different tasks or projects, it can be difficult to not only keep track of but also remember what everything is about!

With that in mind, having a quick automated summary for each document means you can grasp what the document is about at a glance. It also saves time for the person sending you the Word documents as they won’t have to write a summary themselves - Copilot will do it for them. The summary will be part of the notification email you’ll get when the document is shared, so you can immediately get the gist of what you’re looking at before you open the document.

While it’s a bit disappointing to see this feature locked behind the license, it’s not surprising - Microsoft has been building out Copilot’s capabilities gradually, giving professional 365 users the first taste of each new feature. Regardless, it does offer a glimmering look at the future of Microsoft’s steady implementation of AI tools - and we hope to see more that prove to be just as simple and helpful as this one.

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Muskaan is TechRadar’s UK-based Computing writer. She has always been a passionate writer and has had her creative work published in several literary journals and magazines. Her debut into the writing world was a poem published in The Times of Zambia, on the subject of sunflowers and the insignificance of human existence in comparison.

Growing up in Zambia, Muskaan was fascinated with technology, especially computers, and she’s joined TechRadar to write about the latest GPUs, laptops and recently anything AI related. If you’ve got questions, moral concerns or just an interest in anything ChatGPT or general AI, you’re in the right place.

Muskaan also somehow managed to install a game on her work MacBook’s Touch Bar, without the IT department finding out (yet).

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