Copilot displays content on a gray background in your browser. This seems to be because the app differentiates the box where you type with a white background. When you copy a single sentence from a Copilot response, pasting it into another location, like Microsoft Word or Google Docs copies the gray background along with it. You have a couple of options for deciding how to remove the gray background when pasting from Copilot.
Option 1 for removing the gray Copilot background
The easiest way to avoid the gray background when copying text from Copilot is to use the copy button. This button is located at the bottom of the Copilot response, next to the thumbs up and thumbs down icons. Clicking this button copies everything in Copilot’s response, including links to any websites referenced in the response.
A big advantage of using the Copy button is that you maintain all the text formatting. If you don’t want to copy everything and you only need a sentence or two, option 2 may work better.
Option 2 for eliminating the gray Copilot background on text
The other way to eliminate the gray background when pasting from Microsoft Copilot is to change the way you paste. Normally when you paste, all formatting in the text you copied is also carried over when you paste. In the case of copying from Copilot, that includes the gray background.
There are two ways to avoid this depending on whether you paste using the right click menu or a keyboard short cut. If you paste using the right click menu, you want to choose Paste and Match Style instead of choosing Paste.
If you paste using a keyboard shortcut, you need an extra key. The standard paste operation is Ctrl+V on Windows or Command+V for macOS. By modifying this to either Shift+Ctrl+V or Shift+Command+V, you do not keep the gray background and only the text you copied will be pasted from Copilot.
There is a downside to this approach. If you copied something that had other formatting, like bullet points or bold text or italics, that formatting will be gone too. That leaves a third option for removing the gray background after pasting from Copilot
Option 3 is removing the gray background after pasting from Copilot
A final option is to copy the text like you always do. Paste the text into your document. After pasting the text from Microsoft Copilot into your document, select it and use the text edit tool to change the background from gray to whatever color you prefer.
These same suggestions will also work for other AI tools like ChatGPT, which also has a background color when copying and pasting text.
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