Hi,
Copilot Studio, at its core, generates responses as plain text. Even if your knowledge base contains nicely structured or “formatted-looking” content, the agent doesn’t have the ability to translate that into real Microsoft Word formatting. It can reproduce the content correctly, but it cannot apply things like custom fonts (Poppins), heading styles, bold text segments, or proper Word tables with borders. The formatting you might notice when testing in Copilot is just how the UI renders text, it’s not actual document formatting underneath.
The key thing to understand here is that a knowledge base in Copilot Studio only influences what is written, not how it is styled in a Word document. So even if your KB defines a format, the agent treats it as instructions for text structure, not as a template it can enforce programmatically. That’s why, when you move the same logic into an agent, everything comes out unformatted.
To get a properly formatted Word document, the practical way is to shift the formatting responsibility outside Copilot Studio. Typically, this is done using Power Automate with a predefined Word template. The idea is simple: let Copilot generate the content, but let another tool handle how that content is presented in a document.
A working approach usually looks like this:
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Create a Word template where all formatting is already set (fonts, headings, tables, layout, etc.)
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Add content controls inside the template (these act as placeholders for dynamic data)
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Store that template in SharePoint or OneDrive
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Build a Power Automate flow that uses the “Populate a Microsoft Word template” action
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Pass the content generated by Copilot Studio into that flow
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Let the flow generate the final .docx file with all formatting applied
Once you connect this flow back into your Copilot Studio agent as an action, the experience becomes seamless, the agent generates the content, sends it to the flow, and the user receives a properly formatted document.
So in your case, nothing is wrong with your KB or instructions. The limitation is simply that Copilot Studio doesn’t currently support rich document formatting on its own, and the only reliable way around it is to combine it with Power Automate and a Word template.
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