Microsoft’s Copilot Pro launched last month as a $20 per month subscription that gives you priority access to the latest OpenAI models and improved image generation, as well as access to AI-powered features within select Office apps. We provide
Over the past month, I’ve been testing Copilot Pro to find out if it’s worth paying the $20 subscription for your everyday needs, and whether it’s worth paying for the $20 subscription for your daily needs and how you can use AI-powered images and text across Office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. We have seen how good or bad the generation of is. While some of Copilot Pro’s features are a little disappointing at this point, others are really useful improvements that I’m not sure I could live without.
Take a closer look at all the features you get with Copilot Pro today.
Designer image creation
One of the main attractions of subscribing to Copilot Pro is the improved version of Designer, Microsoft’s image creation tool. Designer uses OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 model to generate content, and his paid Copilot Pro version creates widescreen images with much more detail than the free version.
I’ve been experimenting with images using Designer and find that they are especially impressive when you fill in as much detail as possible. Asking a designer “an image of a dachshund sitting by a window staring at a slice of bacon” will generate some good examples, but you can give the designer even more by providing additional prompts. You can run it. Adding more descriptive language to produce “hyper-realistic paintings” with “natural light, medium shots, and shallow depth of field” significantly improves image results.
As you can see in the two examples below, the designer added some depth of field around the bacon to get the natural light right. Unfortunately, the bacon here is not just one, but multiple, and it’s a huge piece of bacon.
Like most things related to AI, the Designer feature isn’t perfect. I generated another image of a dog staring at bacon and randomly inserted a giant piece of bacon. In fact, I think most of the time, out of the four images of him that are generated, you can only use one or two. DALL-E 3 still struggles with text. Especially if you ask your designer to add labels or signs with text on them.
However, the “illustrated image of a 1910 UPS deliveryman, in the style of early Japanese manga” worked well and added the UPS logo, even if it was a little wonky. Copilot Pro allows you to generate 100 images per day, much faster than the free version.
Copilot in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook
However, Copilot Pro isn’t just for image generation. This subscription unlocks AI features within Office apps. Within Word, you can use Copilot to generate text. This can help you start outlining your document or adjusting your paragraphs.
If you have numerical data, you can also visualize this data as a graph or table in Copilot. This is especially useful for making text-heavy documents a little more readable. When you highlight text, a small Copilot logo appears, prompting you to select that text to rewrite or visualize. If you select an entire paragraph, Copilot will attempt to rewrite the paragraph with the various options available to you in a cycle.
Similar to image generation, paragraph rewriting can be a bit hit-or-miss, and swapping words introduces different meanings to sentences. Overall, I didn’t feel like my writing skills improved. It may be much more useful for people who don’t write regularly.
I personally find Copilot in Outlook very useful. I use this every day to check my email summary. This is convenient because it is displayed at the beginning of the email. You may want to purchase Copilot Pro just for this feature, as it can save you a lot of time when planning projects for multiple people.
It’s also very useful when you have long-running email threads to easily get an overview of all the important information. You can also use Copilot in Outlook to generate emails and compose replies. Just like in Word, there’s a rewrite tool here that lets you draft an email and it analyzes it and generates suggestions to improve the tone and clarity of your email.
Copilot in PowerPoint is equally useful if you’re new to creating presentations. Request slides to be generated in a particular style and the entire deck will be returned to you within seconds. Designer is part of this feature, so you can explore individual slides and change images and text.
As someone who hates creating presentations, this is something I will definitely use in the future. It’s definitely better than any PowerPoint template you can find online. However, I ran into some issues with PowerPoint slide generation. In particular, I ran into an issue where Copilot would say “Still working on it” and sit there and not finish generating the slides.
Copilot for Excel seems to be the most limited part of the Copilot Pro experience at this point. Data must be neatly organized in tables. Otherwise, Copilot will try to convert it. Once you have data to work with in Copilot, you can create visualizations, use data insights to create pivot tables, and even get formula suggestions. Copilot for Excel is still in preview, so we hope to see more features added over time.
A final example of Copilot within an Office app is OneNote. Just like in Word, you can draft notes and plans here, and easily rewrite text. Copilot also provides a summary of your notes. This can be especially interesting when trying to summarize shorthand notes or incomplete notes that can only be understood in your head.
CoPilot GPT and the future
Microsoft also has a number of GPTs for fitness, travel, and cooking. These are essentially individual assistants within Copilot that help you find recipes, plan your vacation itinerary, and create personalized workout plans. Copilot Pro subscribers will also soon be able to build their own custom GPTs based on specific topics.
Overall, I think Copilot Pro is a good start for Microsoft’s consumer AI efforts, but I’m not sure I’d pay $20 a month for it yet. There are definitely improvements in image generation here, and for some people it might be worth the $20 per month.
While Outlook’s email overview might make you interested in subscribing, the text generation feature isn’t all that unique to Office apps. I feel like I can get just as good results using the free versions of Copilot or ChatGPT, but I have to go through the manual (and cheaper) option of copying and pasting the results into a document.
The consumer version of Copilot Pro is not yet as fully featured as the commercial version, so we expect to see many improvements in the coming months. Microsoft shows no signs of slowing down on its AI efforts, and plans to reveal more details about its AI plans at Build in May.
