Microsoft has not killed off Office and it needs saying upfront because the internet has spent days on the wrong story.
What happened instead is a lack of clarity in Microsoft’s rebranding. Over the past week, reports have spread across Reddit, Hacker News and X saying that Microsoft Office has been renamed “Microsoft 365 Copilot”. It sounds believable, but it is also wrong.
Gareth Oystryk, senior director of Marketing, Microsoft 365, clarified: “We have not made any recent naming changes to our Office apps. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, the Office apps within the Microsoft 365 productivity suite, remain unchanged.
In November 2022, we renamed only the Office “hub” app for web and mobile to the Microsoft 365 app. In January 2025, we updated it to the Microsoft 365 Copilot app to reflect its role in bringing Copilot and Microsoft 365 productivity experiences together in one place.”
The source of the confusion was that Office.com redirected users towards what Microsoft calls the Microsoft 365 Copilot app.
This is not a new office suite, it’s a hub. One place to open Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, alongside Copilot features, under a single banner.
Microsoft set this path years ago. In 2022, the company dropped the Office name at the brand level and replaced it with Microsoft 365. The familiar apps never disappeared. What changed was the wrapper around them.
Then, as Copilot became central to Microsoft’s pitch, the old Office app was renamed again, this time as the Microsoft 365 Copilot app.
That is where the language tripped people up. On Microsoft’s own site, users are greeted with the line: “The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office)…”. Read quickly, it looks final, almost like an end notice for Office itself. That single phrase was enough to birth the idea that Office had been fully replaced.
It has not. Word is still Word. Excel still opens spreadsheets. PowerPoint still builds slides. Businesses and individuals can even buy Office 2024 as a standalone package, without cloud tools and without Copilot. That option alone should settle the case.
The timing made things worse. Microsoft has recently pushed the Copilot name harder than ever, positioning it as the front door to productivity. Office.com now reiterates that message. The result is a blurred line between the apps people use every day and the hub Microsoft wants them to launch from.
What surprises me is not that users are confused, but that Microsoft seems surprised by the reaction. So far, the company has not publicly stepped in to clear the air. Silence, in this case, has allowed assumptions to do the talking.
There are risks here. Some users now believe Office no longer exists. Others assume Copilot is mandatory or that familiar tools are being phased out. For businesses, especially cautious ones, that kind of uncertainty slows decisions and feeds distrust.
This episode is about unclear messaging layered on top of years of background rebrands. Microsoft may see Microsoft 365 Copilot as a neat, unified story. Many users see something else entirely, a once-simple product family wrapped in names that no longer explain themselves.
Office, whatever Microsoft chooses to call it at the top level, is still very much alive. The problem is that Microsoft’s own words have made that harder to see.
