You can use ChatGPT inside Word now without leaving the document, and you don't need a paid plan to do it.
On Thursday, September 17, OpenAI added Word to its Office add-in. Excel and PowerPoint already had it. Now one add-in covers all three, on every ChatGPT plan: Free, Go, Plus, Pro, and the business ones. It's a sidebar. Select text, tell it what you want, it works on the selection.
Copilot lives in the same apps and does a similar job, but it needs a Copilot licence. This doesn't. If your company never paid for Copilot, this is the first AI most people will get inside Office.
Install it (three minutes)
Microsoft Marketplace, search "ChatGPT", install the add-in.
Open Word, Excel or PowerPoint. It's on the ribbon, opens as a sidebar.
Sign in with the account your ChatGPT plan is on.
It rolls out to business accounts by default on October 1 unless an admin turns it off, so if you're on a work laptop and it isn't there yet, that's why.
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Right. Back to it.
What to hand it first, per app
Word. Rough notes to a first draft, the paragraph you've rewritten four times, proofreading, an executive summary of a long document, fixing headings and numbering. Select the text first. It works on what you select, not the whole file, which is the right default.
Excel. Explain a formula somebody else wrote. Analyse data spread across tabs. Update an existing workbook. Build a sheet from a description. The "explain this formula" one is the best of the three, because every business has a spreadsheet nobody dares touch.
PowerPoint. A full deck from notes or a document, with editable slides. Summarise what a deck is actually saying. Turn a table into slides. No animations, complex templates or custom fonts, so it builds the bones and you dress them.
The one I'd run this morning:
Read the selected text. Write a one-paragraph executive summary for somebody who has 30 seconds and has to make a decision from it. Then list the three numbers or claims in the text I should double-check before I send it.That second list is the part that saves you. It reads more carefully than you do at 8am.
What to check
Three things I'd want you to know before you rely on it.
The add-in doesn't share history or memory with your normal ChatGPT. What you taught it in chat, it doesn't know here. Each task costs credits from the same pool as ChatGPT's other agent features, roughly 20 to 110 a task, so the free plan runs out fast if you hand it a whole deck. And it will get complex formatting, charts and tables slightly wrong, every time. Verify formulas before they go into anything that has a currency symbol in it.
Make it stick
Because there's no memory, keep a short "house rules" block in a note and paste it at the top of the first request in each session: your tone, your number format, your date format, what a finished summary looks like. Ten seconds, and the output stops sounding like a stranger wrote it.
That's one document drafted where the document lives. An owner's week is thirty documents, and half of them are the same document with new numbers.
If you own a business and want the boring work off your plate, that's what Run On Claude is for. Every repeat job you'd hire for, set up on Claude so it runs on autopilot, with the install files. You keep the decisions. Owners only. $147 a month until member 50.
Quick one.
Word, Excel or PowerPoint: which one eats your week? Hit reply, it picks what I go deeper on.
Talk soon,
Zephyr
