What started in 2019 as a couple of utilities for things like window and shortcut management has gradually expanded to nearly 30 useful tools, including a keyboard shortcut creator, an image-to-text extractor, and a better search bar than the one that's built into Windows proper. PowerToys has become wildly popular among Windows power users, with more than 70 million downloads to date, but it's also completely free, with no ads, Office upsells, or ham-fisted Copilot integrations.
Microsoft keeps touting its Copilot AI as the greatest invention since the wheel. Toward that end, the company has been force-feeding more and more AI into Windows in the belief that everyone is yearning for an "agentic OS." Well, based on much of the user feedback, that's not quite the case. In fact, the more Microsoft keeps promoting AI as some white knight riding in to rescue Windows users, the more that people have been pushing back. The main argument?
Microsoft is pitching this new tool to retailers as a way to reach a wider pool of potential customers and offer a seamless shopping experience that is more likely to convert sales. By integrating purchases directly into Copilot rather than redirecting consumers to an external site, the hope is that with one less step, customers will be more likely to click buy, rather than abandoning their cart.
Microsoft has something special just for you. The company just introduced something called Copilot Checkout at the NRF 2026 retail conference. This is exactly what it sounds like. It's a shopping assistant embedded within Copilot. The feature is rolling out now in the US and integrates with PayPal, Shopify, Stripe and Etsy. It lets people complete purchases directly inside of Copilot without having to withstand the grueling experience of being redirected to a retailer's website.
Microsoft has made OneDrive agents generally available, allowing users to query multiple documents simultaneously through Copilot instead of just one at a time. Users can select up to 20 files and create an agent, saved as a .agent file in OneDrive. Rather than teasing information out of individual documents, Microsoft says users can make cross-document queries, including "What decisions have we made so far?" and "What risks keep coming up?" The agent then generates a response based on the documents' content.
Copilot Cowork brings together long-running parallel task completion inside of Microsoft 365 Copilot, with the agent able to complete work in the background so workers can focus on other tasks. This allows you to amplify your work and be more productive while you multitask and work across all kinds of different Microsoft 365 applications.
The announcement, part of the broader Copilot custom agents' rollout, introduces two purpose-built agents: C# Expert and WinForms Expert in the form of agent instruction Markdown files. The C# Expert agent is designed to guide and enforce modern C# best practices. It respects project conventions, minimises unnecessary code artefacts such as unused interfaces or parameters, and emphasises async/await patterns with proper cancellation and exception handling.
The "What's New" first-run experience will appear during startup to guide users through the app's latest features. According to Microsoft, "this dialog provides a quick overview of what's possible in Notepad and serves as a helpful starting point for both new and returning users." It can be closed and reopened by clicking a megaphone icon in the top-right of the toolbar.
Microsoft has woven its generative AI technology throughout Microsoft 365, the company's productivity suite. Its Copilot AI assistant is most often used in M365 apps for text-oriented actions, such as generating email or document drafts in Outlook or Word, or writing summaries of Teams meetings. In Excel, of course, Copilot's primary uses lean toward calculations and data analysis. It can also help you style or edit a spreadsheet.