What's new — June to August 2026
The
Work IQ APIs — M365 Copilot's context layer (Data / Memory / Inference) — reached
GA on June 16, 2026, and Copilot Cowork went GA the same day on usage-based
Copilot Credits ($0.01/credit pay-as-you-go). This does not change how you use Copilot in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel:
in-app Copilot remains covered by your existing M365 Copilot licence and is not separately metered. Copilot Credits apply only to
custom or third-party agents (Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, raw Work IQ APIs) that ground in your M365 data via Work IQ.
July 2026 additions: OpenAI's
GPT-5.6 family is now available across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Copilot Chat, and Cowork, tuned by OpenAI and Microsoft as the preferred model for M365 Copilot knowledge work (Rolling Out, per the Microsoft 365 Copilot blog). Anthropic's
Claude Sonnet 5 is rolling out inside Microsoft 365 Copilot (including Copilot Cowork and Copilot in PowerPoint) as a new frontier model for agentic multi-step work. Copilot in Word gains a
model choice picker (rewriting, summarising, restructuring),
comment-based edits that read reviewer comments and apply the changes, and an
agentic experience on iOS. Copilot in Excel gains reusable
Skills,
personalisation preferences across workbooks, and workbook
.Rules sheets. Copilot in PowerPoint adds a
Brand Kit Picker, the ability to
reference SharePoint libraries and OneDrive folders, and
MAI-Image-2-Efficient for faster image generation (GA). Agent Mode in PowerPoint can now use Work IQ to gather files, meetings, and emails automatically, and can reference a Teams meeting or chat when creating a presentation (GA, Roadmap IDs 555874, 555885, 555884, 555883). Copilot Notebooks now generate structured
Excel, Word, and PowerPoint files from notebook content (GA), and cited Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF files now
open inside Copilot Chat instead of an external tab (GA, Roadmap 548641).
Audio Overview in Word on the web adds real-time voice interaction (GA, Roadmap 523206). A tenant-wide
Prompt Gallery reached GA (Roadmap 486695) for publishing curated prompts.
Mid-July 2026 addition: agents built with the
Model Context Protocol (MCP) reached general availability in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Catalyst on July 15, 2026, accessed through the Copilot pane. Previously these agents were not integrated into the Office apps; the change removes the app-switching step. Rollout is gradual under Microsoft's safe deployment model, so availability may vary while it completes.
Late July 2026: PowerPoint Copilot is adding support for personal, user-defined
custom skills stored in OneDrive across web, desktop, and Mac. Users upload a skill folder containing a SKILL.md file to a designated OneDrive location, and those skills then appear in the Copilot Skills menu inside PowerPoint. A consistent
Copilot entry point is also coming to classic Outlook, matching the entry point across the other apps (Roadmap 567007, in development).
Early August 2026: Microsoft's July roundup lists these as rolled out. In Excel, a
brand kit skill that applies Brand Center colours, fonts, and logo. In PowerPoint,
branded assets from the Microsoft 365 Brand kit, the ability to
write, reply to, and resolve comments, and
iOS and iPad capabilities covering multi-step planning, implicit and explicit grounding, and background work; listed for August in PowerPoint are the OneDrive custom skills noted above and
assigning tasks and notifying stakeholders in comments. Two roadmap items reached GA:
voice Q&A during Read Aloud in Word, so a user can ask what a passage means or for a section summary without pausing playback (Roadmap 523205), and
referencing an attached deck's style in Agent Mode in PowerPoint, so a new presentation picks up the theme and styles of the file you point at (Roadmap 555878). The
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents can now be mentioned directly in a Copilot Chat prompt, which means files get created without leaving Chat. One cancellation: Microsoft has decided not to move forward with
complex web search with Copilot in Excel (Roadmap 566872, cancelled 5 August 2026), so drop it from any plan that counted on Excel reaching the open web.
Mid-August 2026: Microsoft's 11 August release-notes batch covers work released between 28 July and 11 August with no per-entry dates, so every item in it carries the same date, and its general availability label means released to Current Channel and still rolling out inside a tenant rather than fully deployed everywhere. In Word,
Anthropic models can be selected when editing with Copilot, where only OpenAI models were available before (GA). In PowerPoint, Copilot can draw on
enterprise image assets held in an Adobe Experience Manager library connected to Microsoft 365 when creating a presentation in Edit mode, instead of only public or user-uploaded images (GA); a presentation can be started
directly from the PowerPoint web app home screen, which Microsoft states applies to Microsoft 365 Copilot Basic and Premium (GA); and Copilot can
reference web sources while creating a deck, which live web information could not be used for there before (GA). In development,
reviewing PDFs from the Copilot context menu in OneDrive for iOS will explain, summarise, translate or answer a question about selected text, matching the desktop behaviour (Roadmap 568790, October 2026 target). Two cancellations land in the same week. Microsoft has decided not to move forward with the
=COPILOT worksheet function in Excel, which would have let a formula generate, classify and summarise text and data in place against a January 2027 target date (Roadmap 499658, cancelled 13 August 2026), and it has dropped
improved long-file navigation using document structure, which was to give more accurate answers and clearer citations on long and complex files (Roadmap 559614, cancelled 12 August 2026). With the Create experience item covered in the visual creator guide, that is three roadmap withdrawals inside one seven-day window.
See the licensing/comparison guide for the full cost picture.