Hello and welcome to working with Microsoft 365 Copilot in PowerPoint. My name is Lee Mucciarone and I'm a Microsoft 365 content creator for Cloud Academy. I have four years of IT experience working for Microsoft with two years of specialized experience as a customer training specialist training users on Microsoft tools.

Today we're looking at Microsoft's new AI assistant tool, Microsoft 365 Copilot. Specifically, I'll be taking you through Microsoft PowerPoint and how Copilot can improve your workflow with its powerful generative capabilities. So let's jump right into PowerPoint and see what we're working with.

Here we are in a brand-new PowerPoint presentation. We can find the Copilot window up in the top-right corner of our ribbon. Clicking on this brings up the all too familiar Copilot prompt window with a couple of suggestions on how we can get started creating content.

Let's start with creating our presentation and then move into the other options. For my example, let's say I want to create a presentation about the US stock market. So I will write out a prompt like “Create a presentation about current trends in the US stock market and estimations for the future”, and Copilot will then get to work.

After a few moments I should have a fully created presentation, but this isn't exactly what I was looking for. So let's undo that and go back to the prompt window and give it a bit more detail. Let's try a prompt like this: “Create a presentation on current trends within the US stock market and highlight a few top performers”.

Again, Copilot will take a moment and then provide me with the presentation which now includes callouts for top performing stocks within the market. This is a great start for the presentation, but I want to add a bit more detail and I can also do that with Copilot. I can go to this slide and ask Copilot to rewrite it with more detail. Copilot will then recreate the slide with more information. I can even ask Copilot to add another slide for a specific topic like US inflation trends and it will generate a completely new slide specific to that topic.

Now you may have noticed that throughout using Copilot, it has continually suggested that I use the Designer tool to adjust the layout of the slides. This gives me more options when choosing the layout for the slide that I'm working on. The cool thing about this is that if I go into the Design tab and choose a different design for my presentation, Copilot will recognize that and use the current design I selected when creating its content.

The one difficulty with showcasing the features of Copilot, however, is that due to its nature, it has a massive list of capabilities and features which I can't possibly cover in its entirety. And due to the nature of generative AI, different users with different needs will think of different use cases, making it sometimes difficult to consider what prompts might help you achieve a certain result.

And for those situations, we have Copilot Lab. Copilot Lab is a collection of different Microsoft provided prompts to provide you with inspiration for interacting with Copilot. We can find Copilot Lab by coming down to the prompt box and clicking on this notebook icon. Clicking this gives us a couple of different specific uses for Copilot.

Clicking any of these will provide you with a couple of prompt examples to get you started, but I can also click on “View more prompts” to be met with a library of different ideas which can be sorted based on the category of prompt you are trying to use.

I can even click on “Go to Copilot Lab”, which brings me to the Copilot site and gives me not only prompts but suggestions on how to create better prompts for Copilot. I can click on any of these to add them directly to my prompt window, but for now, I'll just close this.

And now we move on to my favorite feature of Copilot in PowerPoint, creating a new presentation from a file. So let's close this presentation and open up a new one to start creating. Opening up Copilot again, I am met with the same options as before, only now I'll choose to “Create a presentation from a file”.

Just like in Microsoft Word, I can choose a document I want to make a presentation for by choosing from the suggested documents or typing the name of the document. So I will find the LeMuccia document and click on that and Copilot will begin drafting a presentation for me based on the information within that document.

You can see it's slowly generating an outline and after a few moments we will have our presentation. Just quickly scrolling through the slides we can see a bunch of information about our fake company, complete with an agenda for the presentation.

I can mess around with design templates and as I do that, the entire presentation is also updated, making it super easy to customize the presentation to my liking. We can see that some of these slides, however, are a bit wordy and don't really make for a good presentation. So let's change that with Copilot.

I'll just ask to reduce the text on the screen, leaving only the main points and like that we are left with only the couple of key points on this slide. Once that's done, I can ask Copilot to make the slide more visual, which should make this slide look a lot nicer than just a bunch of text. And like that, we have a really nice-looking slide covering the future of the LeMuccia company.

But looking through this PowerPoint, I don't see any information about our new project, project A.L., which makes sense because that wasn't in our reference document. So I'll find where I want to add the slide which looks like it should fit just about here, and then write a prompt, “Add a slide teasing about our upcoming project called project A.L., which is a revolutionary AI data analysis tool”. After a moment, we will have our new slide and we can edit it as much as we need.

Obviously, since this slide was created without any reference, the information on here will need to be adjusted, but this does a good job of showcasing the capabilities of Copilot. At this point, the presentation is already looking pretty good. All that's left is to organize it a bit and we should be good to go. So let's ask Copilot to organize our presentation and see what it comes up with.

Copilot actually tells us exactly what it did in the Copilot window. It says that it created three sections and added two introduction slides, which we can see over in the slides menu over here. But now that the presentation is all set and organized, I want to do some last-minute animations. And as luck might have it, Copilot can even do that for us.

I'll just head to the slide that I want to add animations to and ask Copilot to “Add animations to this slide”. After a minute, Copilot has added some basic animations that we can see depicted by these numbers on our screen. So with our slides all done, we can save it and we're ready for our presentation.

The last thing I want to show you is how Copilot can summarize information. This feature can be specifically useful when you're looking through a larger deck and need to pick out important information, but just to showcase it, I will have Copilot summarize this deck.

Copilot gathers all the important information from each of the slides and provides them all right here within the Copilot window. Also, just like in Word, Copilot has the capabilities to access organizational data to help you quickly and easily find information which you can use in your presentation. Just by swapping this option here to use organizational data, I can ask Copilot when the LeMuccia company was founded and it will search my organization's data and provide me with the answer as we can see here.

But those are the basics of Copilot within PowerPoint. There is so much functionality that it's nearly impossible to cover it all, so I highly suggest getting in there and messing around with it yourself to get a better idea of all of its capabilities. Thank you very much and have a great day.

Working with Microsoft 365 Copilot in PowerPoint

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