Microsoft’s New Windows 11 Feature Promises Efficiency—But Is It Solving the Right Problem?

Published Apr 30, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

Gavin is the Segment Lead for the Technology Explained, Security, Internet, Streaming, and Entertainment verticals, former co-host on the Really Useful Podcast, and a frequent product reviewer. He has a degree in Contemporary Writing pillaged from the hills of Devon, more than a decade of professional writing experience, and his work has appeared on How-To Geek, Expert Reviews, Trusted Reviews, Online Tech Tips, and Help Desk Geek, among others. Gavin has attended CES, IFA, MWC, and other tech-trade shows to report directly from the floor, racking up hundreds of thousands of steps in the process. He's reviewed more headphones, earbuds, and mechanical keyboards than he cares to remember, and enjoys copious amounts of tea, board games, and football.

Windows Click-to-Do is one of the major AI-powered tools Microsoft introduced with its Copilot+ PC branding, bringing onboard summarization, questions, rewriting, and more at the touch of a button. It promises to analyze what's on your screen and help make your life easier, scanning documents and suggesting handy rewrites on any subject matter, keeping your voice and productivity in mind.

On the surface, that sounds great. Who wouldn't want an AI tool on their laptop, actually performing like the AI tools we were promised?

But as someone long skeptical about Click-to-Do and how it actually works, I thought it was about time I fully engaged with Microsoft's helping hand to see if it could actually make my day faster, smoother, and easier, and whether it's time everyone started using Click-to-Do more often.

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How does Microsoft Click-to-Do work?

I summon thee, AI tool

Conceptually, Click-to-Do is fun, right? Most PCs and laptops manufacturered in the past couple of years are all theoretically Copilot+ Ready with Windows 11, meaning that you have the potential to use Click-to-Do on any system.

You press Win + Q or hold Win to call Click-to-Do, where it creates an overlay on your screen with a purple hue and border, turning your cursor into a bright circle. Once you click, the circular cursor turns into a vertical cursor, similar to what you'd find in a word processing app. From here, you can highlight features on your screen that you want Click-to-Do to engage with.

Click-to-Do has a range of options in this regard, some of which change depending on the context. However, in its current guise, Click-to-Do mostly relates to the summarization of documents and other text-based features on your screen, with varying success depending on the content type and, really, your expectation of what the tool can do.

It's all about summarizing and streamlining written text

Which it does, to varying degrees

The standard Click-to-Do context menu offers a few options:

• Copy
• Open with >
• Search the web
• Summarize
• Create a bulleted list
• Rewrite >
• Ask Microsoft 365 Copilot
• Draft with Copilot in Word

Most of the options are self-explanatory. Hit Copy, and Click-to-Do will paste the highlighted text into the Clipboard. Why you'd do this instead of highlighting and pressing CTRL + C is slightly beyond me, but it works.

Similarly, Open with > works just as it does throughout the rest of Windows, but copies the text straight into your new document. It's pretty handy.

But depending on the screen, you'll also find other options. For example, if I launch Click-to-Do on an image, the context menu offers options to Visual Search with Bing, Blur background with Photos, Erase objects with Photos, or Remove background with Paint. All of these options launch their respective programs and typically focus on the use of AI in that tool.

Summarize and Rewrite

Now, two tools you won't find in your regular context menu are Summarize and Rewrite, both of which are AI-powered tools "exclusive" to Click-to-Do.

Summarize is a mixed bag, like most of Click-to-Do. No matter the subject matter, it gives a surface-level breakdown of whatever is on screen. At times, that could be useful, but most of the time, it strips out useful context that actually explains what you're reading.

For example, I asked Click-to-Do to Summarize part of a MakeUseOf article explaining how to use an ESP32 chip to boost your Wi-Fi. It summarizes what was there, but removes the actual steps of how to get there. Similarly, I asked it to summarize an article explaining a PyPi exploit, but it can only explain what's on the screen rather than the whole piece.

It's to be expected — it's a summary after all. But because summarizing is limited to the on-screen content, it's not as useful as, say, just asking Copilot in Edge or Aria in Opera to summarize the whole page you're reading.

The Rewrite option can definitely be useful in certain situations. If you're stuck for what to write in a response, need to rapidly improve some writing, and aren't sure how to do so, or just need a nudge in the right direction, it can work. But it's worth remembering that, as Click-to-Do uses the inbuilt Phi Silica AI model accelerated in your onboard NPU, it's never going to compete with using a larger cloud-based LLM like Claude, or even using a small but powerful local AI model like Qwen on your device.

But as it stands, it requires every aspect of your summarizing and rewriting to take a moment to load and to break your concentration, which I didn't find particularly useful for any workflow.

Ask Microsoft 365 Copilot/Ask Copilot

I didn't spend much time using Click-to-Do when it first launched, but one of the key features is that you can highlight information on your screen and send it to Copilot for analysis. Then the Copilot app on your computer or laptop can jump into action.

Only that in my case, on this Asus Zenbook A14 (2026), it could only send to Microsoft 365 Copilot, which is infinitely less useful and didn't do anything, ever, even after making sure I was working in a Word document and attempting to analyze office-related information.

I figured it may have been a configuration issue, but removing Copilot 365 and specifically installing Copilot didn't make a new option appear on this laptop. But on my older Asus Zenbook S14 (2024), the option to Ask Copilot is there, and it is much more useful.

Could it be that I haven't activated Windows? Or that my Microsoft Account is suggesting a specific app? I'm not entirely sure, to be honest, but I know that I couldn't find a way to force Click-to-Do to use Copilot on this device.

That said, the option to use Copilot is useful and helps you hand off searches and anything that requires more detailed explanations to a more powerful tool. The Copilot app is a cloud-based AI tool, so it connects to the internet and can provide up-to-date information, additional data, and similar when you throw your Click-to-Do query over.

Click-to-Do needs significant improvements to be worth using full-time

The limitations of Click-to-Do in its current guise mean that, largely, I'd skip this for now. It has promising signs: the idea that you have a button that helps to streamline your work, offer suggestions, and more is wonderful. That's the real AI future we're standing at the edge of currently, wondering when it'll fully arrive.

But for now, it's fair to say that Click-to-Do doesn't excel at any of the tasks it's designed for, which makes it hard to suggest you devote any serious time to using it. Like most of Microsoft's AI implementations so far, the idea is good, but the implementation feels rushed, like it was pushed live before it really needed to be out there, just for the sake of saying "Look at this feature."

It needs much stronger and in-depth rewrite options, for a start. The option to summarize more than a few sentences is also vital. But more than that, much greater context awareness is required for Click-to-Do to begin taking on the major alternatives in the AI space, especially now that some folks use tools like OpenClaw to manage and organize files on their machines. By extension, cross-app actions would also be useful, like "Copy part of this PDF into Slack," "Send this quote to Outlook," and so on.

It's also inconsistent. As I explained, on one laptop I was offered the option to Ask Microsoft 365 Copilot, and on another, the regular Ask Copilot option was available. Then, on one device, the options to visual search and edit images appeared, but not on another. Yet there was no real way of telling why this was the case or what I could expect.

Click-to-Do has potential, but Microsoft needs to make it feel like a natural tool linked to your processes, rather than as yet-another-AI-tool we have to ignore, find a use for, and hand over system resources to make useful. Until it solves that, it's more Don't-Click rather than Click-to-Do.