Microsoft Introduces “Vibe Working” with Agent Mode in Word and Excel

Microsoft has rolled out a new Agent Mode in Word and Excel that converts simple prompts into complex documents and spreadsheets. Alongside this, a dedicated Office Agent in Copilot chat can now generate Word documents and PowerPoint presentations with a chatbot

Microsoft explained that the new OpenAI GPT-5-powered Agent Mode is built into Word and Excel. It allows users to create documents and analyze spreadsheet data using simple text prompts. This AI-powered tool can generate reports, financial analyses, and other content by interpreting existing material and executing multi-step tasks with validation checks to ensure quality.

The Agent Mode for Excel achieved a 57.2% accuracy rate on the SpreadsheetBench benchmark. This score is significantly higher than previous AI tools, but still below the 71.3% accuracy typically achieved by human experts.

Office Agent in Copilot chat: a different approach to AI assistance

Microsoft has debuted a new Office Agent within Copilot that uses Anthropic’s Claude AI instead of OpenAI’s models. This feature can also generate Word and PowerPoint files from the user’s prompts. It pulls publicly available information from the web, conducts research, and creates outputs.

Unlike Agent Mode, Office Agent doesn’t perform detailed step-by-step planning or iterative validation. However, Microsoft claims it still represents a major improvement over earlier OpenAI-based document generation capabilities in Microsoft 365 Copilot, which users found unreliable and prone to errors.

“Today we’re bringing vibe working to Microsoft 365 Copilot with Agent Mode in Office apps and Office Agent in Copilot chat,” explained 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.”

The idea of “vibe working”

Microsoft’s concept of “vibe working” is a new way of interacting with Office tools like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint using AI agents. It’s inspired by “vibe coding,” where developers build apps through conversational prompts. Similarly, vibe working lets users create and refine documents, spreadsheets, and presentations by simply chatting with AI.

Overall, these new AI-powered features can be highly useful by simplifying complex tasks. They help to save time and enable users to create professional documents and analyze data with minimal effort. However, these features could also be harmful if users rely too heavily on them without verifying outputs, especially in sensitive areas like finance or legal work.

As of this writing, Microsoft’s new Agent Mode is only available in the web versions of Microsoft Word and Excel in the Frontier program for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers or Microsoft 365 Personal/Family subscribers. However, Microsoft plans to add support for native desktop apps soon. Meanwhile, the Office Agent in Copilot is currently available to US customers with Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscriptions.