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You’ve probably heard of vibe coding — novices writing apps by creating a simple AI prompt — but now Microsoft wants to introduce a similar thing for its Office apps. The software maker is launching a new Agent Mode in Excel and Word that can generate complex spreadsheets and documents with just a prompt. A new Office Agent in Copilot chat, powered by Anthropic models, is also launching today that can create PowerPoint presentations and Word documents from a “vibe working” chatbot.
“Today we’re bringing vibe working to Microsoft 365 Copilot with Agent Mode in Office apps and Office Agent in Copilot chat,” says Sumit Chauhan, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Office Product Group. “In the same way vibe coding has transformed software development, the latest reasoning models in Copilot unlock agentic productivity for Office artifacts.”
Agent Model in Excel and Word is a more powerful version of the Copilot experience that Microsoft has added to its Office apps. It’s designed to make the complex parts of Excel more accessible to users that aren’t experts. “It’s not just simple assistive short answers, but board-ready presentations or documents,” Chauhan says. “It’s work, quite frankly, that a first-year consultant would do, delivered in minutes.”
Agent Mode performing tasks inside Excel on the web. Image: Microsoft
Agent Mode essentially takes a complex task and breaks it down with planning and reasoning that you can follow. It then uses OpenAI’s GPT-5 model to break down each step of document creation into an agentic task and execute it. It’s like watching an automated macro in real time, showing everything it’s doing in the sidebar.
Microsoft has taken a gradual approach to adding AI elements to Excel, particularly because the data it handles powers some of the most important parts of businesses worldwide. “[Agent Mode] lets you build sheets that are auditable, refreshable, and verifiable,” Chauhan says. “We have spent a ton of time making sure that the validation loop on all of these sub-agents is pretty tight.”
Microsoft says its Agent Mode in Excel has an accuracy rate of 57.2 percent in SpreadsheetBench, a benchmark for evaluating an AI model’s ability to edit real world spreadsheets. This result places Agent Mode above Shortcut.ai, ChatGPT agent with .xlsx support, and Claude Files Opus 4.1. It’s still behind the human accuracy of 71.3 percent, though.
Agent Mode in Word goes beyond the existing writing, rewrite, and summarization AI features in Word. “Agent Mode in Word turns document creation into vibe writing, an interactive, conversational experience,” Chauhan says. It lets Copilot draft content, suggest refinements, and clarify what elements are needed during the process of document creation.
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