Copilot in Word - now does not read entire doc - payload limit

Question

I have Microsoft 365 Premium. I'm using Copilot in Word. I just started noticing that it was not reading my entire doc when I ask it to "read the entire active document".

This was working fine a couple of weeks ago. I'm not sure when it broke, because Copilot does not tell you it cold not read the doc. I just saw from it's response that it did not, so...

When I asked it, it said:

What’s blocking me here is a separate, smaller “single read” payload limit on how much of the active document Word will send to me in one shot. When that cap is hit, Word returns: “The document content has been truncated to meet size constraints.”

And it pointed me to this link / article which says the limit could " 1.5 million words or 300 pages"

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/keep-it-short-and-sweet-a-guide-on-the-length-of-documents-that-you-provide-to-copilot-66de2ffd-deb2-4f0c-8984-098316104389

I then saved my have a 65K words (205 pages) doc to a txt file, and then loaded it back in as a docx file. That gets rid of TOC, images, and other embedded metadata. I did my same test, and the result is the same - payload limit on how much of the active document Word will send to me in one shot.

Answer 1

CoPilot is basically useless today due to this truncating issue. I've been working on a suite of documents that need to remain in a single file (per CoPilot guidance a month ago) in order to assure everything within the suite of documents stays in harmony as I update the document. It is in Word and under 200 pages. It was 2.6MB this morning and I removed graphics to get it down to only 272KB. I've had no issue with this process for the past 1.5 months. However, today I can't get it to not have truncation issues with only being able to manage the first half of the document. I'm hoping it is just a MS issue that is impacting it's capacity today. If it doesn't work again on Monday, I guess I will have to switch to another AI tool. The issue is we have an enterprise license for CoPilot. May have to switch this license to ChatGPT.

Answer 2

Thank you for taking the time to respond. However, I cannot accept your answer:

1. You just repeat what is already in the (outdated) document.
2. The ability to read my entire Word doc (66k words) used to work. Clearly MS has "broke" it by setting up a new limit (without telling customers) in the Word API.
3. The idea of "splitting the document into a few logical sections" (whatever "logical" means), means a lot more effort for me - the point of AI is to do the work.

For what it's worth, I tried a test...

In the Word chat pane, I clicked the menu icon (...), and selected "Open in M365 Copilot App"

The browser launched (https://m365.cloud.microsoft/chat) , and I prompted to "search" for some text I knew was near the end of my document:

read the active word document. find the chapter where Lucas says “..."

It found it! Here's the Reasoning it used:

Reasoning completed in 6 steps

Searching for pattern in document

• Looking into querying and searching files with specific keywords to identify patterns within documents, particularly using Office 365 tools.

Searching

• OK, I'll search for "I'll explain it all when we get back-ten minutes" ...

Opening reference file

• Opening the file from the website to review its contents.

Finding quoted text

...

More Detail it showed:

Opening reference file Opening the file from the website to review its contents.

The fact that it was able to "Opening the file from the website", means that the limitation is in the Word "API".

MS needs to fix this. Clearly there will be some limitation, but 66K vs 1.5M is a big difference. Premium users should have higher limits.

Answer 3

Hi, Dennis

Sorry for this frustrating experience that you're having. What’s happening here is that the 1.5 million words / 300 pages article is more of a general guideline, not a guarantee that Word will send the whole document to Copilot in

The most practical options you have now, still, are splitting the document into a few logical sections and run Copilot on each one separately, then ask it to combine those summaries; and asking about a specific section, topic, or chapter instead of saying “read the entire active document."

If the important material is buried in the middle, copy that part into a shorter temporary file first. Long files may get less attention in the middle, and page-range targeting in Word does not exist today.

Hope this helps. Feel free to get back if you need further assistance.

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