--- title: "Build a Five-Minute Audit of What Survived the Copilot Cull" date: 2026-09-08T00:00:00Z updated: 2026-09-11T10:34:05Z tags: ["Copilot", "Excel", "Microsoft 365", "Licensing", "Outlook", "Troubleshooting", "Getting Started"] canonical: https://bianca.codes/blog/build-an-audit-of-what-survived-the-copilot-cull/ --- # Build a Five-Minute Audit of What Survived the Copilot Cull _On 15 April 2026 the Copilot button vanished from Excel with no in-app notice. This is the dated six-row audit of which surfaces still answer you, which refuse, and which never could._ On 15 April 2026 the Copilot button disappeared from Excel, Word, PowerPoint and OneNote for anyone without a paid licence at an organisation over 2,000 seats. Mine was one of them. There was no in-app notice, no migration prompt, nothing in the File menu explaining where it went. The button was there on Tuesday and gone on Wednesday, and the first place I found a plain-English description of what had happened was a university IT helpdesk page. What you are building is a six-row audit sheet that records which Copilot surfaces still answer you, which refuse, and which will still take a workbook if you hand it over another way. It takes about five minutes, needs no admin rights, and every row is dated, because every answer in it has a shelf life. You need Excel (desktop or web), your work account, a throwaway workbook with fifty or so rows of realistically messy data, and a browser tab. ## Why an audit beats reading the documentation The documentation describes the paid tier. That is not a conspiracy, it is a consequence: the paid tier is the product with the marketing budget, so the tutorials, the feature pages and the launch posts all describe what a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence gets you. The removal itself went out through admin Message Center notices rather than a page anyone outside IT would find, which is why the clearest public write-ups are things like [Washington State University's ITS notice](https://its.wsu.edu/2026/04/29/copilot-chat-removed-from-word-excel-powerpoint-and-onenote/) rather than anything on Microsoft's own site. So you cannot read your way to an answer about your own machine. You have to test it. The audit exists because the gap between "what Copilot does" and "what Copilot does for you, today, on this build" is now wide enough to waste an afternoon in. ## Step 1: Establish which side of the 2,000-seat line you are on The threshold is organisation size, not your job title or your team. Organisations with more than 2,000 Microsoft 365 users lost in-app Copilot Chat entirely for unlicensed staff. Organisations under that line kept it in Word, Excel and PowerPoint under standard access, which means the same features with throttling at peak times and periodic prompts to upgrade. You will not find this number in Excel. Ask whoever runs your tenant, or infer it from headcount if your organisation is nowhere near the boundary. Record the answer as a number and a source, not as a feeling. "About 3,000, per IT, 8 Sep" is an audit row. "I think we're a big org" is not. ## Step 2: Record the Excel ribbon and the build number together Open Excel, look at the Home tab, and write down whether a Copilot button is there. Then go to File, Account, About Excel and copy the version and build string. Record those two things in the same row. A capability without a build number is a rumour: six weeks from now, when the button reappears or vanishes again, the only way to tell whether your environment changed or your memory did is the build you tested against. This is the single habit that makes the sheet worth keeping. While you are in there, check the label. Microsoft added in-product labels alongside the change: **Copilot Chat (Basic)** for users without a paid licence, **M365 Copilot (Premium)** for users with one. That label is the fastest answer to the question everyone in your team is arguing about. ## Step 3: Hand a workbook to the standalone app Open the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, or go to it on the web, and sign in with your work account. Upload the throwaway workbook and ask something that cannot be answered without reading it. Not "what does this spreadsheet do" but "which three customers in this file have the largest gap between invoiced and paid, and what are the amounts". Two things go in the audit row. First, whether the upload control is offered to you at all. Second, whether the answer quotes real values from your file or produces a fluent paragraph about invoicing in general. The second failure mode is the one that catches people out, because it reads like an answer. This is the row that matters most, because it is where the capability went rather than where it died. The pane is gone from Excel. The ability to ask questions about a workbook is not. ## Step 4: Test Outlook separately, because Outlook was carved out Outlook was explicitly excluded from the removal. Inbox and calendar grounding kept working for unlicensed users when the four Office apps lost theirs, which means your organisation can be simultaneously "Copilot is gone" and "Copilot is fine" depending on which window is open. Summarise a long thread and check the summary against the thread. If you want the version of this with actual technique attached, I wrote up [turning a forty-email thread into three lines](/blog/copilot-in-outlook-thread-summary/) in August. For the audit, one row is enough: works, degraded, or refused. ## Step 5: Test the thing that was never yours to lose Ask about a document that lives elsewhere in your tenant. A SharePoint file, a colleague's shared workbook, something in a Teams channel. Expect a refusal or a polite non-answer. Record that row as **never included**, not **removed**. Grounding in your organisation's own content is a paid-tier capability and always was, so a refusal here is the product working as designed. The distinction is worth writing down because it stops you raising a ticket for a feature you never had, and it stops a colleague telling you confidently that it used to work. If a surface refuses something you are fairly sure it should do, the answer is more often the prompt than the licence. That is a whole separate argument, and I have [already made it](/blog/copilot-doesnt-work-is-usually-a-prompting-problem/). ## Step 6: Date the sheet and give it an expiry Six rows, one date, one build number. Something close to this: ```plaintext Date Surface Result Build / note 2026-09-08 Org size vs 2,000 Over ~3,100 seats, per IT 2026-09-08 Excel ribbon Refused 16.0.18827.20164, no Copilot button 2026-09-08 Label under account Basic "Copilot Chat (Basic)" 2026-09-08 Standalone app + upload Works Quoted real values from the file 2026-09-08 Outlook thread summary Works Inbox grounding intact 2026-09-08 Tenant file grounding Never had Paid-tier capability ``` Then make the sheet tell you when it has gone stale, rather than trusting yourself to remember: ```vba =IF(TODAY()-A2>90,"Re-run this audit","Current as of "&TEXT(A2,"d mmm yyyy")) ``` Ninety days is a guess, and a deliberately generous one. This particular set of answers changed twice in the twelve months before I wrote it down, so treat the number as the longest you should go, not a recommendation. ## Common mistakes ### **Recording a capability without the build number.** The most common way this sheet becomes useless is being right in a way you cannot reproduce. Six weeks later something behaves differently and you have no way to tell whether Microsoft shipped a change, your admin flipped a policy, or you tested a slightly different thing the first time. The build string costs you four seconds and it is the difference between an audit and a note to self. ### **Treating every refusal as a bug.** Three different things produce a refusal: a capability that was removed in April, a capability that was never on the free tier, and a capability that exists but was asked for badly. They look identical from the outside and they have completely different responses. Sorting a refusal into the right bucket at the time you see it is most of the value of doing this deliberately rather than ad hoc. ### **Auditing with a clean toy workbook.** Fifty tidy rows with proper headers will get you a confident answer from almost anything, which tells you nothing about the workbook you actually need help with. Use something with merged cells, a stray total row in the middle, and at least one column where the dates are text. If a surface handles that, the row means something. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### **Did Microsoft remove Copilot from Excel for everyone?** No. The removal on 15 April 2026 applied to users without a paid Microsoft 365 Copilot licence at organisations with more than 2,000 Microsoft 365 users. Smaller organisations kept Copilot Chat in Word, Excel and PowerPoint under standard access, which throttles performance at peak times. Anyone with a paid Copilot licence was unaffected. ### **Why did the Copilot button disappear from Excel with no warning?** The change was communicated to tenant administrators through a Microsoft 365 Message Center notice rather than through an in-app announcement or a public documentation page. If your IT team did not forward it, the first sign for most people was the button being missing. This is why the clearest public descriptions of the change are university and enterprise IT helpdesk pages rather than Microsoft's own site. ### **Can I still ask questions about an Excel file without a Copilot licence?** Usually yes, but not from inside Excel. The standalone Microsoft 365 Copilot app and the web version still accept a file upload and answer questions about its contents for unlicensed users. The workflow changes from pointing at a workbook you have open to handing over a copy of it, which is slower but reaches the same answer. ### **Does Copilot still work in Outlook if it was removed from Excel?** Yes. Outlook was carved out of the April 2026 removal, so inbox and calendar grounding continued to work for unlicensed users after Copilot Chat disappeared from Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. It is entirely normal to have a working Copilot in one Microsoft app and no Copilot at all in another on the same account. ### **How do I tell which Copilot tier I am on?** Microsoft added in-product labels when it made the change. "Copilot Chat (Basic)" indicates a user without a paid Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, and "M365 Copilot (Premium)" indicates a user with one. Checking the label takes a few seconds and settles most arguments about whose Copilot is broken. ### **How often should I re-run this audit?** Every ninety days is a reasonable ceiling, and sooner if your Office build number changes or your organisation's licensing does. The underlying answers moved twice in the twelve months to September 2026, so an audit older than a quarter should be treated as a starting hypothesis rather than a fact. ## Where to go from here Once your sheet is filled in, the next question is what to do with the surfaces that survived. That is the tested map of what is still reachable and what it is genuinely good at, coming up in what is left of Copilot after the Excel pane disappears. And if the whole exercise has left you slightly annoyed about how you found out, that is fair, and it is the same feeling I was circling in [Copilot didn't arrive as a feature, it arrived as an expectation](/blog/copilot-arrived-as-an-expectation/). ## Downloads ### Copilot surface audit sheet + messy sample workbook The six-row audit from the post, pre-labelled with what to look for at each surface and a staleness banner driven by fnParam. Plus a deliberately messy 50-row sample - text dates, a stray TOTAL row, amounts stored as text - to hand over when you test whether a surface can read a file. - File: `build-an-audit-of-what-survived-the-copilot-cull-download.xlsx` (XLSX, 18.5 KB) - Contains macros: no - Access: email required — https://bianca.codes/blog/build-an-audit-of-what-survived-the-copilot-cull/#downloads