Microsoft 365 Copilot gets new home page and edits files on its own

What's new

The Microsoft 365 Copilot app gets a new home page, Home, where Chat and Cowork sit on the same screen. It rolls out in October 2026 through Frontier, Microsoft's early access program, and requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.

Copilot can now edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files directly in Copilot. In Outlook, it can sort your mail: delete, move, copy and categorize emails, as well as manage rules and folders. Chat can also handle long, multistep tasks, which you follow in a Tasks view. Agents are now called plugins in the left-hand menu.

In addition, the GPT-6.1 Sol and Claude Sonnet 5.5 models roll out from September 30, and Copilot in SharePoint is generally available from the same date. Notebooks also gets an update: support for Markdown, TXT and RTF files as sources is generally available.

What's smart

Copilot goes from finding and summarizing information to doing the work. According to the sources, it can now act inside systems, hand off entire tasks and make changes directly in documents.

In Excel, a pane called Show Changes displays what Copilot has changed, with links to the affected cells. That makes it easy to check the work before you trust the result.

In Notebooks, direct editing of Office files on the notebook canvas, interactive reports, PDF creation and model selection are being tested. Within a few weeks, you are also expected to be able to create a notebook from your goal, set up recurring tasks and save audio overviews in OneDrive. These are plans, not something that has happened yet.

Cheaper or better?

The per-user price for the new features has not been disclosed. The sources mention only license requirements and usage-based billing, where you pay according to how much you use. That applies to the new models, the Code tab and Autopilot, which is called Scout and is in private preview with no set date. File editing requires Copilot plus Chat or credits.

Notebooks requires a Copilot or Copilot Chat license and a SharePoint or OneDrive service plan. Access is possible through Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, Premium or Pro. Monthly prices are not given in the sources.

A comparison with competitors such as Google Gemini in Workspace is not included in the sources. Nor is it clear whether the features are available in Denmark on the individual dates. Most of it is Frontier, so the rollout is not general, and Office Watch writes that Microsoft is imprecise about timing.

Administrators face deadlines. The Copilot web app redirects to copilot.cloud.microsoft, so the entire *.cloud.microsoft domain must be allowed. On November 1, the SharePoint PowerShell controls end, on November 30, access to App Builder ends, in January 2027, Targeted release ends, and existing .agent files are supported until March 2027. New APIs give better control over usage, but daily reporting of credit consumption lags by 2-3 days.

What it's good for

The features suit people who are drowning in emails and documents. The Outlook cleanup can save time in the inbox, and file editing is useful when a report, a spreadsheet or a presentation needs a thorough revision.

Notebooks is a place to gather sources and let Copilot work with them. Companies using SharePoint get Copilot in their document library. If you are an early adopter, you should try it out in Frontier and keep an eye on usage before anything is rolled out widely.

In September, Copilot in Teams and Outlook got the same look as the main app, and Copilot Search became the default search in SharePoint and OneDrive.