Microsoft has launched a game-changing update to Office 365 that could fundamentally transform how millions of people work with spreadsheets and documents. The company calls it "vibe working," and it's bringing AI-powered automation directly into Excel, Word, and PowerPoint through two powerful new features: Agent Mode and Office Agent.
What Is Vibe Working?
Think of vibe working as the Office equivalent of "vibe coding"—where beginners can create complex applications with simple prompts. Instead of spending hours wrestling with formulas or formatting, you can now tell Copilot what you need, and it handles the technical heavy lifting while you guide the process.
Agent Mode in Excel achieved a 57.2% accuracy rate on SpreadsheetBench, a benchmark for evaluating AI's ability to handle real-world spreadsheet tasks—outperforming competitors like ChatGPT and Claude, though still trailing human experts at 71.3%.
Agent Mode: Your Excel and Word Expert
Agent Mode transforms how you interact with Excel and Word by breaking down complex tasks into manageable steps. In Excel, you can prompt it to "Run a full analysis on this sales data set and make it visual," and watch as it selects formulas, creates new sheets, generates charts, and validates its own work—all while showing you exactly what it's doing.
The feature uses OpenAI's GPT-5 model to break down document creation into individual tasks and execute them like an automated macro in real-time. For Word users, Agent Mode enables conversational document creation where Copilot drafts content, suggests refinements, and asks clarifying questions throughout the writing process.
What sets this apart is the iterative approach. Agent Mode not only generates outputs but also evaluates results, fixes issues, and repeats the process until the outcome is verified—functioning like having an expert consultant at your disposal.
Office Agent: PowerPoint and Word from Chat
Office Agent, powered by Anthropic's Claude models, takes a different approach by creating complete presentations and documents directly from Copilot chat. Ask it to "Create a deck summarizing the top 5 trends in athleisure clothing," and it will clarify your intent, conduct web research, show its reasoning process with live slide previews, and deliver a polished, ready-to-share presentation.
Microsoft offers Agent Mode inside Excel and Word apps, with PowerPoint support coming soon, while Office Agent in Copilot chat creates PowerPoint presentations and Word documents, with Excel support arriving later.
The practical applications are impressive. Finance teams can generate monthly close reports with product breakdowns and year-over-year growth analysis. Marketing professionals can create comprehensive social media trend reports.
Even personal tasks like building loan calculators or household budget trackers become accessible to non-Excel experts.
Microsoft's VP Sumit Chauhan describes the output as work "that a first-year consultant would do, delivered in minutes."
Agent Mode for Excel and Word is available today through the Frontier program for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers and Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscribers, initially on web versions with desktop support coming soon. Office Agent is currently limited to U.S.-based Personal or Family subscribers through Copilot chat on the web.
This represents Microsoft's bold bet that AI assistants can democratize access to advanced Office features, making expert-level spreadsheet modeling and document creation accessible to everyone. Whether "vibe working" catches on as more than just marketing speak remains to be seen, but the underlying technology marks a significant leap in how AI integrates with productivity software.