Microsoft Office 365

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Microsoft 365 is a family of software, including Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Microsoft Excel. The branding Office 365 was introduced in 2010 to refer to its subscription-based software as a service, including hosted services such as Office on the web.

Consumer Impact Summary

Overview of concerns that arise from the conduct towards users of the product (if applicable):

• User Freedom
• User Privacy
• Business Model
• Market Control

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Incidents

Microsoft Copilot on by default(Word, PowerPoint, Excel)

In the current version of Office 365, Microsoft Copilot is turned on by default. It can be turned off in some of the Office applications' options (Word, Excel, but not PowerPoint, though Microsoft say they'll add the "off" button to PowerPoint in February 2025).

Forced upsell

In January 2025, YouTuber Atomic Shrimp reported that Microsoft had enacted a "forced upsell" of 365's new AI Copilot feature. Users with basic accounts (now called "Classic"), such as Shrimp himself, had been informed their subscription fee was going up, but that they would enjoy new features as a result, including Copilot. In his efforts to disable Copilot, Shrimp subsequently discovered that Microsoft now offered "Classic" plans, identical to the old basic plans both in features and in subscription fee. The option to downgrade to Classic, however, was only visible to enterprise users, not to personal users. In essence Microsoft upgraded users' plans without their consent and disabled the option to downgrade, forcing the user to contact Microsoft support in order to opt out of the newly introduced Copilot AI features. The forceful upgrade was at the user's expense, and the downgrading process through support, according to Shrimp, was very time consuming. It is possible to downgrade a personal account through the website without contacting support. If you go to the first page of the cancellation process, there should be an option to downgrade to the "Classic" plan.

Obfuscation of local saving in favor of OneDrive (Word, PowerPoint, Excel)

Because of OneDrive, since the introduction of Office 365, saving files locally has been getting more and more difficult to do. Previously, the user would get the expected saving dialog with a pop-up to browse their computer and choose a file-storage location. This is now multiple clicks away, making it harder to avoid saving the file on OneDrive, Microsoft's cloud service.

Files on one's computer are also automatically uploaded to OneDrive by default, causing numerous issues (such as synchronization errors and duplicate files) Turning off this automatic backup is also of considerable difficulty, as one has to navigate a number of settings to get to this option.

To mitigate this somewhat, user can go into Options > Save > Set the check mark on "save locally as default". It still takes multiple clicks to save a file, but the cloud options are at least a bit less intrusive.

See also

• Software as a service
• Dark pattern