No, Microsoft Office didn't just get renamed to Microsoft 365 Copilot

You may have seen posts on social media claiming that Microsoft just changed the name of its Office suite to "Microsoft 365 Copilot." However, that name change probably isn't for the 'Office' you are thinking about, and it's certainly not new.

Many social media posts on Twitter/X, Bluesky, and other platforms are discussing Microsoft Office's rebranding as Microsoft 365 Copilot, with some of the posts calling it "breaking" news, including the official account for Perplexity AI. See, we told you AI isn't a good source of information.

First, the name change from to Microsoft 365 Copilot isn't a new development. The screenshots in most of the posts are from the Office.com home page, which Internet Archive confirms has said "the Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office)" since at least February 14, 2025. Earlier backups of the home page simply said Microsoft 365.

There's also some confusion over what exactly has been renamed, in part because Microsoft has done an atrocious job at branding over the last few years. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are still called Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

There are at least three things now called Microsoft 365 Copilot:

1. Microsoft 365 Copilot for iPhone, iPad, and Android – This is the mobile app you use for browsing and editing files. It used to be called 'Microsoft 365' and 'Office' before that.
2. Microsoft 365 Copilot for Windows – This is the desktop application that acts as a hub for your Office documents, OneDrive files, and other data. It's preinstalled on most Windows PCs, and it used to be called 'Office' at one point.
3. Microsoft 365 Copilot website – This is a web app with shortcuts to the cloud versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other apps, and also has a Copilot chat box and OneDrive files. It's what you see when you click 'Sign in' on the Office.com site today, or if you navigate directly to m365.cloud.microsoft.

The actual subscription service that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive, and other Microsoft applications is still called Microsoft 365. Before that, it was called Office 365. The non-subscription versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are still called Office, with the latest version being Microsoft Office 2024.

Microsoft also told How-To Geek in a statement, "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."

It's true that Microsoft's repeated rebrands are dumb, and the endless array of Copilot features in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are largely unhelpful. However, your Word taskbar shortcut isn't about to be renamed. This is just a change for Microsoft's hub apps, and an old change at that.