How to Turn Off Copilot in Windows, Outlook, and Office

Last updated August 7, 2026

I used Copilot when it first showed up, back when I was running every chatbot side by side to see which one stuck. It was capable. I ended up on ChatGPT because it was more flexible at the time, and I haven’t gone back in about a year, so treat my read on the product itself as a year out of date.

What I keep noticing is where it turns up. I don’t use Outlook, I don’t use Word, and I don’t use Edge, so Copilot has almost no way to reach me. Gemini reaches me constantly, because it rides Chrome and Chrome is what I already have open on every machine I own. That difference has nothing to do with which model is smarter.

If Copilot does reach you, it reaches you in four separate places, and every one of them has its own off switch buried in its own menu. That’s the actual reason people turn it off and keep seeing it.

Why Copilot Shows Up in Four Different Places

Copilot isn’t one product with one setting. It’s a brand stretched across Windows, Outlook, the Office apps, and Edge, and each team shipped its own toggle in its own menu. Turning it off in one place has no effect on the other three.

Microsoft’s strategy here is distribution. Rather than convince you to go get Copilot, it installs Copilot where you already are. That’s a reasonable bet when you own the operating system and the office suite, and it explains why the thing keeps appearing in places you didn’t ask for.

The numbers suggest the bet hasn’t converted. Of roughly 450 million Microsoft 365 seats, about 15 million are paid Copilot subscribers, which works out to 3.3%. One analysis puts overall adoption under 4.5% after three years, with roughly 1% using it weekly. That gap between how many people have it and how many people want it is the reason the uninstall options finally arrived.

Worth clearing up one thing, because I had it wrong myself: Copilot is not locked to Edge. Microsoft ships it as a desktop app, a web app, and iPhone and Android apps. What’s Edge-only is the built-in browser sidebar. If you want to think about which assistant should own which corner of your life, I wrote about how I split mine up.

Turn Off Copilot in Windows 11, or Uninstall It

The taskbar icon comes off in Taskbar settings. Since the April 2026 update you can go further and remove the app entirely from Settings, on Windows 11 Home as well as Pro.

To hide the button, right-click an empty part of the taskbar, choose Taskbar settings, and switch Copilot off. That gets it out of your eyeline in about five seconds and leaves the app installed.

To remove it properly, open Settings, go to Apps, then Installed apps, search for Copilot, click the three dots beside it, and choose Uninstall. On Windows 11 24H2 and later Copilot is a standalone app, so it uninstalls like any other program. This used to be an administrator-only trick, and now every Windows 11 user can do it.

If you change your mind later, the Copilot app is still sitting in the Microsoft Store and reinstalls in a couple of clicks. Nothing here is permanent.

Turn Off Copilot in Outlook

Outlook has one Copilot switch and it covers your whole account. Open Settings, go to Copilot, and turn off “Turn on Copilot.” That single change applies on Windows, the web, Mac, iPhone, and Android.

Outlook is the one place Microsoft got this right. Flip it once and it’s off everywhere you read email with that account, which is exactly what people expect a setting to do. Hold that thought, because the Office apps work the opposite way.

Turn Off Copilot in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

Each Office app has its own Copilot checkbox, and it only applies to that app on that device. Go to File, then Options, then Copilot, and uncheck “Enable Copilot.” Turning it off in Word does nothing to Excel.

That’s the detail that makes people think they failed. You switch it off in Word, open Excel the next morning, and there it is again, so you assume the setting didn’t save. It saved. It just never applied anywhere else. Microsoft’s own support page spells this out: the checkbox exists separately in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, and you have to visit each one. If you use Office on both a laptop and a desktop, that’s every app on both machines.

If you don’t see a Copilot entry under Options, your Office install is too old and needs an update first.

The heavier option, and what it costs you

There’s a single switch that kills Copilot across all the Office apps at once. Go to File, then Account, then Manage Settings, scroll to Connected Experiences, and uncheck “Turn on experiences that analyze your content.”

Read the fine print before you do it. That setting governs a lot more than Copilot, so you also lose text predictions, suggested replies in Outlook, and design suggestions in PowerPoint. If those are things you use every day, take the slower route and do the per-app checkboxes instead.

Turn Off Copilot in Microsoft Edge

Edge hides its Copilot control under appearance settings. Open Settings, go to Appearance, then Copilot and Sidebar, then Copilot, and turn off “Show Copilot button on the toolbar.”

While you’re in there, “Allow Microsoft to access page content” is worth a look. Switching it off stops Copilot from reading the page or PDF you’re on when it builds an answer, which is a different concern from whether the button is visible.

There are two caveats you should know about. Hiding the toolbar button only hides the button, so it doesn’t uninstall Copilot from Windows or touch your Office apps. And if this is a work laptop, your IT department may have the button locked on by policy, in which case the toggle won’t hold.

Will It Come Back?

On a personal PC, usually not. The auto-install wave that made headlines in mid-2026 came through the Office apps’ own updater and it targeted business machines, not home ones.

The specifics are worth knowing because most guides get them wrong. Microsoft resumed auto-installing the Microsoft 365 Copilot app in mid-June 2026, running through early July. It arrived through the Microsoft 365 Apps updater rather than Windows Update or the Store, it targeted commercial Windows 11 machines with Microsoft 365 Business subscriptions, and devices in the European Economic Area were left out. Microsoft had paused the same rollout earlier in the year after complaints, then restarted it.

So if Copilot reappeared on your machine after you removed it, the most likely explanation is that you’re on a work device where an administrator controls the software. That’s a conversation with your IT department, not a setting you can win on your own.

The Honest Limitations

Some of this you can’t fully solve, and it’s better to know which parts.

• There is no master off switch. Four surfaces, four settings, and Microsoft has given no sign that’s changing.
• On a managed work computer, policy beats your preferences. Every toggle here can be overridden by whoever administers the machine.
• Windows 11 Home has no Group Policy Editor, so the policy-level lock needs a registry edit. The plain uninstall works fine without it, and for most people that’s enough.
• Connected Experiences is a blunt instrument. It turns off Copilot along with several features that have nothing to do with it.
• Uninstalling the Windows app doesn’t touch Copilot in Office or Edge. Those are separate installs with separate settings.

Fifteen minutes gets all four of them, and Outlook and Windows alone will cover most of what bothers you. If Copilot ever earns a place back on your machine, the Store is right there.

Related reading: How to turn off Google AI Mode | The 2026 AI assistant stack | What free ChatGPT actually covers now | New to AI? Start here