Microsoft expands 'Vibe Working' mode for MS Word, Excel

Microsoft is expanding its AI capabilities beyond code generation with the launch of Agent Mode in Excel and Word. The powerful new feature will let users create complex spreadsheets, documents, and presentations from a single prompt. The concept is inspired by “vibe coding,” where developers build apps by writing simple AI prompts. Microsoft is applying that same approach to Office productivity tools, enabling anyone without technical expertise to build sophisticated reports, models, or proposals using natural language.

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

Agent Mode essentially takes a complex task and breaks it down with planning and reasoning that you can follow. It then uses OpenAI’s GPT-5 model to break down each step of document creation into an agentic task and execute it. It’s like watching an automated macro in real time, showing everything it’s doing in the sidebar.

Microsoft says its Agent Mode in Excel has an accuracy rate of 57.2 percent in SpreadsheetBench, a benchmark for evaluating an AI model’s ability to edit real world spreadsheets. This result places Agent Mode above Shortcut.ai, ChatGPT agent with .xlsx support, and Claude Files Opus 4.1. It’s still behind the human accuracy of 71.3 percent, though.

Agent Mode in Word, on the other hand, goes beyond the existing writing, rewrite, and summarization AI features in Word.

“Agent Mode in Word turns document creation into vibe writing, an interactive, conversational experience,” Chauhan says. It lets Copilot draft content, suggest refinements, and clarify what elements are needed during the process of document creation.