How to turn off Copilot in Excel in 2026

Whether you’re tracking a budget or using Excel for project management, Copilot in Excel can feel more like an interruption than a helper. With a floating icon beside your cells, pop-up prompts, and formula suggestions that appear mid-task, it can easily clutter up your screen. To get a clean spreadsheet back, you can turn off Copilot in Excel completely or mute only the parts that bother you.

If you want a tidier workspace without losing useful insights from your data, this guide covers both methods. It also explains what to do if the setting is missing, and suggests a better option if you mainly turned to Copilot to help make sense of your information.

How to turn off Copilot in Excel (quick method)

The fastest way to turn off Copilot is the Enable Copilot setting, which Microsoft added starting with Excel version 2501 on Windows.

Here’s how to turn off Copilot in Excel, according to Microsoft Support:

1. Open the options menu: In Excel, go to File > Options.
2. Find the Copilot settings: Select Copilot from the left menu.
3. Turn Copilot off: Clear the Enable Copilot checkbox.
4. Restart Excel: Click OK, then close and restart Excel.

Once Copilot is off, the Copilot button on the ribbon is disabled, and you can’t use any Copilot features in Excel. Since every feature is turned off, the floating icon typically disappears as well.

A few limits are worth knowing before you rely on this setting:

• It only applies to one app on one device: You’ll need to repeat the steps in Word or PowerPoint, or in Excel on another computer, to turn Copilot off there too.
• It affects everyone on a shared computer: Turning off Copilot on a shared device turns it off for anyone who uses it.
• It requires a personal Microsoft account: The setting doesn’t appear for work or school accounts where an IT administrator controls Copilot. Check with them if you don’t see the option.

How to turn off just part of Copilot in Excel

If you’d like to keep Copilot available for the times you need it and only stop the parts that interrupt your work — like the floating icon, formula suggestions, or ribbon button — these lighter controls let you mute specific features. Like the main setting, the options you see depend on your version of Excel and account type.

How to hide the Copilot icon in Excel

The floating Copilot icon that appears beside your selected cells is one of the most common complaints, and you can hide the Copilot icon in Excel without turning Copilot off. 

There are two ways to do it, depending on whether you want a quick fix or a lasting one: 

1. To hide it in the current workbook: Click the floating Copilot icon and select Hide until I reopen this document. The icon disappears while you work, but it comes back the next time you open the file.
2. To hide it in every workbook: Go to File > Options > Copilot and check Show Copilot icon only for highly relevant suggestions. Excel then keeps the icon hidden until Copilot has a suggestion relevant to your data, so you’ll see it far less often.

If you don’t see the Copilot section in Excel Options, or the icon keeps appearing after you change the setting, your version of Excel may not support it yet or your organization may manage Copilot for you. In that case, updating Excel or checking with your IT administrator is the next step.

How to stop Copilot formula suggestions

Copilot suggests formulas in two ways: formula completion and formula by example. With formula completion, a suggested formula appears as soon as you type “=” in a cell, based on the data around it. With formula by example, Copilot looks for a pattern in what you type — so, if you enter “Ana” next to “Ana Lopez” and “Ben” next to “Ben Carter,” it’ll suggest a formula that fills in the first name for every remaining row. You can turn off either one, or both, without disabling Copilot. 

Here’s how to stop Copilot formula suggestions in Excel for Windows:

1. Open Excel Options: Go to File > Options.
2. Find the Copilot settings: Select Copilot from the left menu.
3. Turn off the suggestions: Clear Show Copilot suggestions for completing formulas, Show Copilot suggestions for formulas based on patterns in your content, or both.
4. Save your changes: Click OK.

In Excel for the web, go to File > Options (the three dots) > Copilot Settings instead. You can also turn off formula completion right from a suggestion by selecting More options (the three dots) on the suggestion card and choosing Turn off Copilot suggestions for completing formulas.

Either way, the suggestions stay off until you check the boxes again, so you won’t have to dismiss them every time you open Excel.

How to hide the Copilot button on the ribbon

If the Copilot button on the Home tab is what bothers you, you can remove it from the ribbon. This doesn’t turn off Copilot, though, so the floating icon and Copilot’s options in the right-click menu still work.

Here’s how to hide the Copilot button on the ribbon:

1. Open the ribbon settings: Right-click anywhere on the ribbon and select Customize the Ribbon.
2. Find the Copilot group: Under Main Tabs, expand Home. Select Assistance, the group that holds the Copilot button.
3. Remove it: Click Remove, then click OK and restart Excel.

Since the button can’t be removed on its own, this also hides any other tools in the Assistance group. You can usually add the group back from the same window, using the steps in Microsoft’s guide to customizing the ribbon. If you want to learn more, you can check our Microsoft Excel Tutorial guide.

Analyze your data without the clutter: Try Jotform AI Data Assistant

Many people turn Copilot on hoping it will help them make sense of the data they’ve collected — like survey responses, orders, or customer feedback — and then turn it off when it clutters the sheet without delivering. If that sounds familiar, especially if your data comes from online forms, check out Jotform AI Data Assistant. It turns those responses into clear answers, without the distractions that made Copilot frustrating.

Here’s how AI Data Assistant differs from Copilot in Excel:

• It appears only when you open it: There’s no floating icon following your cursor and no pop-ups on every cell, so it stays out of the way until you ask it something.
• No export required: Jotform AI Data Assistant works directly on the submissions you’ve already collected, so you don’t have to move data into a spreadsheet or separate data analysis tools before analyzing it.

When you open AI Data Assistant in Jotform Tables or Jotform Inbox, you can

• Ask questions in plain language to get totals, averages, and breakdowns of your responses without writing formulas.
• Spot insights like patterns, outliers, and entries that need attention.
• Use AI Columns to classify sentiment, summarize open-text answers, translate responses, or categorize submissions automatically.
• Visualize your data with charts and summaries generated right in the chat.

AI Data Assistant works across Jotform Tables, where you can organize responses and update many records at once, and Jotform Inbox, where you can review submissions and send replies or follow-ups. Connecting both makes data management simpler for your whole team. Finally, you can collect, analyze, and act on your data in one place, on your terms.

A cleaner Excel, without losing your data insights

Turning off Copilot in Excel takes just a few clicks in File > Options > Copilot. If you only want to mute part of it, you can hide the floating icon or stop formula suggestions instead of disabling it completely.

A few things are worth remembering:

• It’s reversible: You can turn Copilot back on anytime from the same File > Options > Copilot menu.
• It’s per app and per device: You may need to repeat the steps in other Microsoft 365 apps or on other computers.
• The full shut-off is desktop-only: You can’t turn off Copilot in the web, iOS, or Android versions of Excel, though you can still stop formula suggestions in Excel for the web.

If you first turned on Copilot to make sense of your data, Jotform AI Data Assistant does that where the information already lives — and without all the clutter. And if your team still works in spreadsheets, the Jotform Microsoft Excel integration can send your form submissions to Excel too. Try AI Data Assistant on your next set of form responses and get answers without writing a single formula.