Word and Outlook are going to stop finishing your sentences

You know the grey ghost words that appear ahead of your cursor in Word, guessing how the sentence ends, waiting for you to press Tab. Microsoft is turning that off by default.

The announcement went up on the Microsoft 365 Insider blog, and the change reaches Word for the web, Word for Windows from version 2609 (build 20430.20000), classic Outlook for Windows from 2608 (build 20329.20000), Outlook for Mac from 16.113, and the Word apps on Android and iOS. Microsoft's reasoning is unusually plain: text predictions help some people write faster, and "others prefer to write without predictive text". Parts of Outlook on phones already had the feature off and they stay as they are.

Nothing is being taken away. In Word it comes back through File, then Options, then General, where there is a tick box for showing text predictions as you type, and Outlook has the same setting under its own options. What makes a change like this worth noticing is that defaults are how software actually behaves for almost everyone. Hardly anybody goes digging through Options, so moving the starting position from on to off quietly changes the experience for millions of documents and emails, and it runs in the opposite direction to most of what Microsoft has shipped in Office these past two years.

You will only see any of this once your copy of Office is on a recent enough build, and desktop apps drift further behind than people expect. Tendvane's app update, which uses winget under the bonnet, is a quick way to see what on your PC is running an old version.