Microsoft Introduces ‘Vibe Working’ to Excel and Word

Microsoft is transforming how people interact with its flagship productivity software by introducing “vibe working” capabilities to Excel and Word. This new approach allows users to generate detailed spreadsheets and polished documents using simple conversational prompts, significantly lowering the technical barrier for creating complex business materials. The initiative includes two key components: Agent Mode within the Office applications themselves and a new Office Agent accessible through Copilot chat.

Sumit Chauhan, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Office Product Group, announced the rollout, stating that these new reasoning models are designed to unlock “agentic productivity for Office artifacts.” He draws a parallel to the impact of “vibe coding” in software development, suggesting this will have a similar transformative effect on office work.

Agent Mode represents a significant upgrade over the standard Copilot experience, offering a more powerful and guided way to handle intricate tasks. It is specifically engineered to make the advanced features of Excel approachable for those without deep expertise. Chauhan emphasizes that the output isn’t just simple assistance; it can produce “board-ready presentations or documents,” comparing the quality to work that a first-year consultant might deliver, but in a fraction of the time.

This mode operates by taking a complex instruction and breaking it down into a logical sequence of steps, all visible to the user in a sidebar. It leverages OpenAI’s GPT-5 model to plan and execute each part of the document creation process, functioning like a transparent, real-time automated macro.

Microsoft has been deliberate in integrating AI into Excel, given the critical nature of the data it manages. A great deal of effort has been invested to ensure the results are reliable. “We have spent a ton of time making sure that the validation loop on all of these sub-agents is pretty tight,” Chauhan notes, highlighting that the system is built to create spreadsheets that are auditable, refreshable, and verifiable.

In performance benchmarks, Microsoft’s Agent Mode for Excel achieved an accuracy rate of 57.2 percent on the SpreadsheetBench evaluation. This places it ahead of several competitors, including Shortcut.ai and ChatGPT agents with .xlsx support, though it still trails behind human accuracy, which stands at 71.3 percent.

Within Microsoft Word, Agent Mode elevates the existing AI features beyond simple rewriting and summarization. It transforms document creation into an interactive, conversational experience. Users can, for instance, command Copilot to generate a monthly report, and it will not only draft the content but also suggest refinements and help clarify what information is needed, making the process feel more like a dialogue.

Beyond the apps, the new Office Agent operates directly within the Copilot chat interface. Powered by AI models from Anthropic, this feature can generate complete PowerPoint presentations or Word documents from a single chat prompt. This directly addresses past shortcomings of AI in creating effective slides. The Office Agent can build fully structured slide decks, perform web research to gather content, and provide a live preview of the presentation as it’s being created.

This move is part of Microsoft’s broader strategy to maintain its leadership in productivity software. “Productivity is our DNA, we’re Office,” Chauhan asserts. While acknowledging that competitors will attempt to replicate their features, he believes there is “no substitute for the real thing.”

The integration of Anthropic’s models into Office Agent also signals a notable expansion of Microsoft’s AI partnerships. While the company remains committed to OpenAI for its core Office app functionalities, it is actively exploring the strengths of different model families. The use of Anthropic’s API, which runs on Amazon Web Services, may explain why these models are currently featured in the cloud-based Copilot chat rather than being deeply embedded in the desktop versions of the applications.

Agent Mode for Excel and Word is available starting today for participants in the Frontier program, which includes Microsoft 365 Copilot customers and Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscribers. At launch, this feature is exclusive to the web versions of the apps, with desktop support planned for a future update. The Office Agent in Copilot chat is also available now within the same Frontier program for eligible subscribers in the United States.

(Source: The Verge)