Frustration!
Bit of a rant, but I’m getting increasingly annoyed with Copilot.
We’re trying to implement what I thought would be an incredibly simple use case: a standard proofreading skill, agent, or prompt for our organisation.
The goal is simple. Staff regularly work with large Word documents, and we want Copilot to proofread them for spelling, grammar, obvious typos, etc., without people having to manually reread entire documents just to catch basic mistakes.
My requirements really don’t seem that complicated:
It should work directly inside a Word document and make corrections using Track Changes. We specifically want Track Changes because users need to be able to verify that no actual content or meaning has been removed or changed.
The prompt or agent should be centrally available to the wider organisation. Everyone should be using the same instructions, so we get consistent behaviour and don’t have 100 people maintaining their own version of a proofreading prompt.
And somehow, with Copilot, I can’t get these two things to work together.
Copilot in Word can finally edit a document with Track Changes, which is great and took long enough.
But as soon as I want to use an agent, that functionality disappears. I can chat with the agent about the document, but instead of actually making the corrections, it gives me a table with suggested changes. I then have to manually find every occurrence in the document and make the changes myself.
That completely defeats the purpose.
Organisation-wide prompts aren’t available in Copilot for Word either, as far as I can tell. So again, one half of the solution exists in one place, and the other half exists somewhere else.
I also tried the new Cowork functionality.
That can actually give me a downloadable Word document with Track Changes, which sounded promising. Except in my test it found a spelling mistake, removed the incorrect word, and then inserted the corrected word after the sentence where the mistake occurred.
Unfortunately, we can’t use Claude because of our data requirements and constraints. But every time I look at what Claude can do with these kinds of workflows, it feels much closer to what I actually want.
That’s probably what frustrates me most about Copilot.
It feels like all the individual pieces are there, but somehow you can’t combine them into the basic workflow you actually need.
Instead of feeling like a finished productivity product, Copilot increasingly feels like one enormous alpha test where every feature exists in isolation. You’re constantly discovering that, yes, it can do X, and yes, it can do Y, but no, it can’t do X and Y at the same time.
Maybe I’m missing something obvious.
Has anyone actually managed to implement something like this successfully?
I’d genuinely love to hear how others are solving this, because this feels like it should be one of the easiest enterprise use cases imaginable.
Rant over.