How to Use Microsoft Copilot in PowerPoint

Microsoft CoPilot for PowerPoint uses AI to help you turn text prompts into presentations. It handles slide creation, suggests designs, and excels at data visualizations. Offloading this work to an AI assistant lets you concentrate on polishing the presentation and delivering your message without any design experience.

Deadlines have a way of sneaking up on us, and presentations are no exception. If you don’t enjoy creating slides (or you don’t like prepping the presentations you have been tasked with), Copilot can help simplify the process. Just think about what you want to create, explain it to Copilot as a text prompt, and watch the magic unfold right in front of you.

It generates your content, makes layout suggestions, and more. Using AI as part of your workflow significantly speeds up your workflow and gets you from a blank page to a finished presentation in record time. 

It has plenty of other features, too, and we’ll dig into all the details to show you how it works and how you can start using CoPilot in PowerPoint.

What is Microsoft Copilot?

Copilot is Microsoft’s answer to the current crop of AI assistants, and it lives in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. It understands how Microsoft apps work and does a good job of helping you create documents, emails, and presentations across Microsoft 365. 

Microsoft Copilot uses Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT (and an opt-in feature that uses Claude Opus models for Researcher tasks) to process language and respond to user requests, but there’s more going on than meets the eye.

With a paid Microsoft 365 Copilot license, you can connect your own data to the AI models, which provides them with all the context about your work that they need. It works with your existing Microsoft 365 apps and helps you get your work done faster.

Key Capabilities

The idea behind Copilot is that it can take your text prompts and run with them, helping you start creating your documents and files. If you prefer more control over your work, Copilot can also offer solid suggestions you can implement yourself. 

One of Copilot’s biggest selling points is that it works across all the Microsoft 365 apps that you are already familiar with, so you don’t need to learn a whole new suite of apps. Agent Mode lets Copilot act like a researcher or analyst, pulling data from your documents and applying it to your slides. 

Why It Matters for Business Leaders and Professionals

Copilot offers massive productivity gains for people who work in areas of business that require extensive domain knowledge and expertise. It frees up time by handling standard tasks, such as creating presentations or drafting documents, while employees focus on more detailed and complex work.

What Microsoft Copilot Does in PowerPoint

Copilot works as an assistant in PowerPoint, offering suggestions for presentations or generating content directly in your slides. The context we mentioned earlier means that Copilot understands your world and makes suggestions based on your work data. 

Content Generation 

If you can’t find a template that suits your presentation, try asking Copilot something like, “Create a cybersecurity awareness presentation for employees about the dangers of phishing.” Copilot gets to work, creating an outline that you can fine-tune and iterate on with manual edits or additional prompts. If you have data files you would like Copilot to use, you can upload up to 5 as references. 

Design Assistance

Copilot can review your content and suggest refinements to your layouts to make your information easier for your audience to digest. It can choose specific styling and layouts to make your presentation look more professional and polished, without you needing to change the design settings.

Data Visualization

When you upload data to Copilot for PowerPoint, all you need to do is describe the data, and it will create the visualizations you need. It really helps make your presentations easier to understand by using real data, and it knows when to visualize with graphs and charts.

Collaboration Features

Copilot helps maintain a cohesive theme when multiple users collaborate on a PowerPoint document. It helps maintain consistency and tracks changes to the document so everyone knows what’s happening.    

Getting Started: Step-by-Step Setup

To try it out for yourself, you'll need Microsoft 365 with Copilot access. Here's how to get started:

Step 1: Access Copilot

Open PowerPoint and look for the Copilot icon in your ribbon toolbar. If it's not there, check your Microsoft 365 subscription at account.microsoft.com/services to see if it is active and that you have a qualifying Microsoft 365 business subscription. Once you’re set up, just click the Copilot icon to open the chat interface. 

Copilot Chat is free for basic M365 subscribers, but in-app generation is excluded. For in-app generation, you will need a  $30/user/month Copilot for M365 subscription for business users, or a $20/user/month Copilot Pro license for home users. 

Step 2: Start Creating with Prompts

Open the chat interface and start with your first prompt. Get specific with your instructions and start with something like "Build a 10-slide sales pitch about cloud security for executives, including market data and ROI examples." 

Copilot loves context, so mention details about your audience, the length of your presentation, and the goals you want to achieve with your pitch. If you only have a free Copilot license, it will suggest actions for you to implement manually.

Generate the entire presentation with Copilot

After a few moments, your first draft of your presentation is ready

Now you are ready to refine. 

Step 3: Get Refining and Iterating

Make adjustments to one element at a time so that you have control and don’t change the parts that you are already happy with.

Step 4: Add Data and Details

Upload your Excel files to cloud storage that Copilot has access to, such as SharePoint or OneDrive. Describe what you want to do with your data for automatic chart creation to kick in. (But try to keep your Excel file size below 24MB for best results.) 

You can ask for speaker notes and even use PowerPoint's Speaker Coach for practicing your presentation.

With the charts created, we can add them to the appropriate slides where they make the most sense.

Step 5: Polish and Practice

Notice how little time you spent on creating your Slide Deck? You’ll probably need to do a little manual fine-tuning here and there, but overall, the process is so much faster than painstakingly designing each slide yourself. That saved time can now go into the most important part of your presentation—practicing!

How to Maximize Copilot’s Effectiveness

Now that you have your shiny new PowerPoint assistant, it's time to figure out how to get the most out of your newfound sidekick. 

Write Better Prompts

Any system that uses LLMs in its interface will benefit from better prompts. Learning how to tell LLMs what you want with precision and direct requests is where you can add the most value. 

Ambiguity with an LLM will give you mixed results and can even lead to hallucinations from the model. This is because if it doesn’t have enough context, it will ‘make up’ facts to fit what it ‘thinks’ you want. 

Use Copilot’s Integration with Microsoft 365

Remember that Copilot is embedded into more than just PowerPoint. Use it to pull information from Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft apps to connect the dots with the work that you’re currently doing. You have a goldmine of personalized data at your fingertips, and you can access it all from Copilot.

Iterate Carefully

Remember, AI systems can take you quite literally if you’re not specific with your requests. Make sure you tell the AI to make targeted, surgical changes to the parts of your presentation that you don’t like, and not to redo the whole thing because of a bad prompt.

Make Branding Easy

Remember to set up your brand kit in the Slide Master so that Copilot automatically applies your brand and styling.

How to Avoid Potential Pitfalls with Copilot in PowerPoint

AI assistants and integrations with LLMs are amazing time savers—but they aren’t perfect. There are a few things that you need to be aware of if you use AI as part of your professional workflow.

Fact Check Everything and Use Your Expertise

Even though you are using a lot of your own corporate data in your PowerPoint presentations, remember that AI systems are not perfect at understanding subtle contexts. The sales figures or stats you are feeding it aren’t always interpreted as intended, so make sure you are certain about the data you are sharing before your presentation. 

Remember that you are the captain of this vessel, and Copilot is your assistant. You are the expert and your judgement is the most valuable part of this partnership. Don’t be afraid to correct the LLM if it tells you something you know is not entirely accurate.

Make It Personal (Even Though It's Business)

LLMs are fantastic generalists by default. Their main appeal is that the answers they produce can apply to a really wide audience. But this focus on generality can make your message seem a little watered down and imprecise. 

Make sure your stats and figures are highlighted and given the importance that they deserve. You don’t want to quickly gloss over the major achievements in your presentation just because the AI system took your presentation in a different direction.

Test Your Presentation Ahead of Time

Run some basic tests and checks on your presentation before your meeting. This will help you spot any logical errors in your flow or missing content sections that you thought you had added in. If you practice beforehand, you should catch any issues that could have slipped through the creation process. 

When and Where to Use Microsoft Copilot in PowerPoint

Copilot is perfect for standard business presentations with a consistent look and feel, especially when your branding needs to follow a set style. It's great for sales decks and training material, and does a great job at project updates and reviews. These are common presentation types that PowerPoint and Copilot handle with ease. 

The better your data sources, the better your slides will be. It helps you visualize figures and stats in a way that speaks to audiences and really lets them see what you are talking about. Excel is an excellent source of data, provided it's formatted in a table that Copilot can understand. 

Copilot banishes slow starts to presentations—no more staring at blank slides while you try to decide what theme to apply. Just let Copilot know what you’re looking to create, and it will get you started in no time. If you don’t like what it produces, a few corrective prompts should get you much closer to your target.

Once you have a design you like, you can ask Copilot to turn it into a reusable template you can use to repeat the same look and feel in future presentations.

Conclusion

Microsoft Copilot for PowerPoint has turned a time-consuming manual process into an automated task that takes much less effort. If you are in a rush, Copilot is the perfect solution for generating great-looking presentations with accurate data. Even if you have your own creative vision for your presentation, Copilot is great for generating ideas that you might not have thought about on your own.

Remember to use your discretion and judgement for the best results, especially if you have had to sit through a few forgettable presentations yourself. Think about what makes a slideshow interesting to your target audience, and give them the stats they need to walk away with good information. 

If you want fast results with repeatable quality, then using Microsoft Copilot in PowerPoint is an excellent choice. Want to try a CBT Nuggets course? Sign up today and your first 7-day are free.