With a new set of Microsoft 365 features, knowledge workers will be able to generate complex Word documents or Excel spreadsheets using only text prompts to Microsoft’s chat bot. Two distinct products were announced, each using different models and accessed from within different tools—though the similar names Microsoft chose make it confusing to parse what’s what.
Driven by OpenAI’s GPT-5 large language model, Agent Mode is built into Word and Excel, and it allows the creation of complex documents and spreadsheets from user prompts. It’s called “agent” mode because it doesn’t just work from the prompt in a single step; rather, it plans multi-step work and runs a validation loop in the hopes of ensuring quality.
It’s only available in the web versions of Word and Excel at present, but the plan is to bring it to native desktop applications later.
There’s also the similarly named Office Agent for Copilot. Based on Anthropic models, this feature is built into Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant chatbot, and it too can generate documents from prompts—specifically, Word or PowerPoint files.
Office Agent doesn’t run through all the steps as Agent Mode, but Microsoft believes it offers a dramatic improvement over prior, OpenAI-driven document-generation capabilities in Copilot, which users complained were prone to all sorts of problems and shortcomings. It is available first in the Frontier Program for Microsoft 365 subscribers.
Together, Microsoft says these features will let knowledge workers engage in a practice it’s calling “vibe working,” a play on the now-established term vibe coding.
Vibe everything, apparently
Vibe coding is the process of developing an application entirely via LLM chatbot prompts. You explain what you want in the chat interface and ask for it to generate code that does that. You then run that code, and if there are problems, explain the problem and tell it to fix it, iterating along the way until you have a usable application.
Enlarge/ A pit stop during the Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix in early March evokes how the team’s manager was feeling when looking at the Excel sheet that managed the car’s build components.
ALI HAIDER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
There’s a new boss at a storied 47-year-old Formula 1 team, and he’s eager to shake things up. He’s been saying that the team is far behind its competition in technology and coordination. And Excel is a big part of it.
Starting in early 2023, Williams team principal James Vowles and chief technical officer Pat Fry started reworking the F1 team’s systems for designing and building its car. It would be painful, but the pain would keep the team from falling even further behind. As they started figuring out new processes and systems, they encountered what they considered a core issue: Microsoft Excel.
The Williams car build workbook, with roughly 20,000 individual parts, was “a joke,” Vowles recently told The Race. “Impossible to navigate and impossible to update.” This colossal Excel file lacked information on how much each of those parts cost and the time it took to produce them, along with whether the parts were already on order. Prioritizing one car section over another, from manufacture through inspection, was impossible, Vowles suggested.
“When you start tracking now hundreds of thousands of components through your organization moving around, an Excel spreadsheet is useless,” Vowles told The Race. Because of the multiple states each part could be in—ordered, backordered, inspected, returned—humans are often left to work out the details. “And once you start putting that level of complexity in, which is where modern Formula 1 is, the Excel spreadsheet falls over, and humans fall over. And that’s exactly where we are.”
The consequences of this row/column chaos, and the resulting hiccups, were many. Williams missed early pre-season testing in 2019. Workers sometimes had to physically search the team’s factory for parts. The wrong parts got priority, other parts came late, and some piled up. And yet transitioning to a modern tracking system was “viciously expensive,” Fry told The Race, and making up for the painful process required “humans pushing themselves to the absolute limits and breaking.”
Williams’ driver Alexander Albon drives during the qualifying session of the Saudi Arabian Formula One Grand Prix at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit in Jeddah on March 8, 2024.
Joseph Eid/AFP via Getty Images
The devil you know strikes again
The idea that a modern Formula 1 team, building some of the most fantastically advanced and efficient machines on Earth, would be using Excel to build those machines might strike you as odd. F1 cars cost an estimated $12–$16 million each, with resource cap of about $145 million. But none of this really matters, and it actually makes sense, if you’ve ever worked IT at nearly any decent-sized organization.
Then again, it’s not even uncommon in Formula 1. When Sebastian Anthony embedded with the Renault team, he reported back for Ars in 2017 that Renault Sport Formula One’s Excel design and build spreadsheet was 77,000 lines long—more than three times as large as the Williams setup that spurred an internal revolution in 2023.
Every F1 team has its own software setup, Anthony wrote, but they have to integrate with a lot of other systems: Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and wind tunnel results, rapid prototyping and manufacturing, and inventory. This leaves F1 teams “susceptible to the plague of legacy software,” Anthony wrote, though he noted that Renault had moved on to a more dynamic cloud-based system that year. (Renault was also “a big Microsoft shop” in other areas, like email and file sharing, at the time.)
One year prior to Anthony’s excavation, Adam Banks wrote for Ars about the benefits of adopting cloud-based tools for enterprise resource planning (ERP). You adopt a cloud-based business management software to go “Beyond Excel.” “If PowerPoint is the universal language businesses use to talk to one another, their internal monologue is Excel,” Banks wrote. The issue is that all the systems and processes a business touches are complex and generate all kinds of data, but Excel is totally cool with taking in all of it. Or at least 1,048,576 rows of it.
Banks cited Tim Worstall’s 2013 contention that Excel could be “the most dangerous software on the planet.” Back then, international investment bankers were found manually copying and pasting Excel between Excel sheets to do their work, and it raised alarm.
But spreadsheets continue to show up where they ought not. Spreadsheet errors in recent years have led to police doxxing, false trainee test failures, an accidental $10 million crypto transfer, and bank shares sold at sorely undervalued prices. Spreadsheets are sometimes called the “dark matter” of large organizations, being ever-present and far too relied upon despite 90 percent of larger sheets being likely to have a major error.
So, Excel sheets catch a lot of blame, even if they’re just a symptom of a larger issue. Still, it’s good to see one no longer connected to the safety of a human heading into a turn at more than 200 miles per hour.
Last week, Microsoft announced that it would soon begin offering previews of Microsoft Office 2024, the next standalone perpetually licensed version of the Office suite. Like Office 2021 before it, Office 2024 will be part of Microsoft’s Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC), which is intended for IT administrators and users who value stability and predictability over constant iteration.
But Microsoft is being clearer than ever that it would really like people to move to using Microsoft 365 subscriptions, referring to Office 2024 as “a specialty product that Microsoft has committed to maintaining for use in exceptional circumstances.” The company will be increasing prices for businesses by “up to 10 percent” compared to Office 2021, a price hike that Microsoft says will “support continued innovation in this niche space.” Pricing for the consumer version of Office 2024 should stay the same as it is for Office 2021.
Office 2024 will receive support and security updates for five years from its release date, which will be “later this year,” along with a new LTSC release of Windows 11. The company has also committed to releasing at least one more standalone version of Office in the future. If you bought Office 2021 and you’re still happy with it, you’ll still get support (including security updates) until October of 2026. Support for Office 2019 ended in October 2023.
Highlights of the Office 2024 release include “new meeting creation options and search enhancements in Outlook, dozens of new Excel features and functions including Dynamic Charts and Arrays; and improved performance, security, and accessibility,” according to Microsoft. One missing feature of note will be Microsoft Publisher, which will be discontinued in October 2026.
Like other standalone Office releases, Office 2024’s feature set will be frozen in time without the continuous changes present in the Microsoft 365 versions of the same apps. And while the perpetually licensed versions of Office can interact with Microsoft services like OneDrive, the company says that other features like the Copilot AI assistant won’t be available in Office 2024 because it is a “disconnected product.” It’s also missing real-time collaboration features available in Microsoft 365.
Enlarge/ Is it a rebrand if you keep using the old brand name in parentheses?
Microsoft
Among other things, the continued existence of the standalone Office product shows that the “Office” brand name will still be with us for a while, despite Microsoft’s formal decision to retire it back in late 2022. “Office” remains useful as a noun that refers to all of these apps collectively—and separately from the Microsoft 365 subscription product. Even in places where the Office name has been removed, Microsoft seems reticent to do away with it entirely; the Microsoft 365 app that comes built into Windows has the new name and the new logo but also includes “Office” in parentheses as if to say “yes, we know what name most people use to talk about this software.”
