Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps for home: your data and privacy

Your data and Copilot

A “prompt” is what you ask Copilot to help you with; the answer Copilot provides is a “response.” Your “activity history” is the record of those prompts and responses. 

In some apps, you can see your activity history even after you close and reopen the app. For example, in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on Windows devices or when using the web versions of those apps. 

For some apps or on certain types of devices, Copilot doesn’t show your activity history after you close and reopen the app. In those cases, every time you open an app, you're starting over again with Copilot.  

Copilot only makes use of the content in the file that you’re working in or content in another file that you ask it to look at. For example, when you ask Copilot to help you rewrite a paragraph in a Word document or when you ask Copilot to generate a to-do list from your notes in OneNote.

Your privacy settings and Copilot

You can choose your privacy settings when you're using Microsoft 365 apps. Your ability to use Copilot features depends on these two settings:

• Experiences that analyze content

• All connected experiences

If you turn off either of those settings, you can’t use Copilot features in these apps:

• Excel

• OneNote

• Outlook

• PowerPoint

• Word

This applies to when you’re running the most current version of these apps on Windows, Mac, iOS, or Android devices.

These settings also turn off other features that you might want to use. For more information, see Connected experiences in Microsoft 365.