Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word (which has gone by a lot of different names—Microsoft Office, Microsoft 365, and most recently Microsoft Copilot) is available to Ashland students at no additional cost and is one of the most common word processing programs out there. The latest online version (Copilot) is not at all focused on making a college paper; it is focused on using Artificial Intelligence to do tasks such as preparing a brief of today’s news from the finance industry or writing funny Out of Office email responses which you can use when you are on vacation. Getting more serious, it wants to write your papers for you.

I absolutely do not recommend using the online version of Microsoft Word for this class. There are several good options, all free, and all legal, which are much better and which do not try to push you into breaking University rules. This is why there is no tutorial here for using MS Word.

What’s good about Word

• It’s free for students for the duration of your stay at Ashland.
• It’s device-independent like Google Docs.
• Like Google-Docs, it auto-saves.
• The current build seems relatively stable.
• The spelling and grammar checking programs are excellent.

What’s not so good about Word

• Finding it from the Copilot home screen is extremely difficult.
• Yes, there is an MLA template, but it is very difficult to find, even after you are in Word. The template itself is a four-page paper (“Exploring the Symbolism of Birds in Classic Literature: A Comparative Study”) that is cumbersome to use and does not do the Works Cited page correctly.
• You must be online to use it, which means that people with unreliable internet are out of luck.
• It’s really slow.
• The files save to the Microsoft OneDrive server, not to your computer, and even though there is now a way to put files in folders, it’s not that obvious. You will probably save everything chronological order. You will probably struggle to find things you created a month ago.
• Speaking of which, your OneDrive space is cluttered with all the files you have created in any Microsoft program plus all the attachments anyone else has ever sent you by email. (The university sends a lot.)
• The files you save are not really yours. They stay on the Microsoft server, and when you leave the university, you lose them.
• Though it’s one of the oldest word processors (first released in 1983) and the paid versions are complete, our online version still lacks some standard features. Until quite recently, you could not delete files from your OneDrive. The PowerPoint application still does not understand numbered lists.

The real problem

So far, the picture I have drawn is a clunky, uncooperative word processor that can be used for writing college papers (if you are patient). Here is my main reason for recommending against using the online version of MS Word (and my reason for not giving you any further instructions):

• Microsoft Word is now tied very tightly to Microsoft Copilot, which means that, from the first click, it is trying very, very hard to get you to use Artificial Intelligence to write your papers. In other words, it is pushing very hard you to violate the terms of the Academic Integrity Policy, which could very well cause you to fail this course or even to be asked to leave the university.
• Yes, I realize that Google Docs has a similar AI product available, but there are several requirements you must meet and you would have to pay for it. Google isn’t exactly cramming AI down your throat.

The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.

The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by Ashland University.

Revised 6/6/25 • Page author: Curtis Allen • e-mail: callen@ashland.edu.