Transform your storytelling with interactive slides in PowerPoint

Derek Johnson​ / Derek_Snook_MSFT​

These look amazing and work very well. Having spent some time with them, though, there are a few things I think Microsoft customers should be aware of when considering Interactive Slides in PowerPoint:

1. Licensing and collaboration: Interactive Slides can only be edited through Copilot by users with a Copilot Premium license. This is important to consider when presentations are collaboratively maintained or handed over to someone without the appropriate license, as they won't be able to use Copilot to update the Interactive Slide.
   
   
2. Updating slides: When asking Copilot to make changes to an Interactive Slide, the results aren't always limited to the specific change requested. We've seen instances where additional elements or content were modified, so it's important to review the entire slide after making updates.
   
   
3. Printing: If an Interactive Slide uses tabs, buttons or other interactions to dynamically display different content, printing the presentation will only capture the content currently displayed. This means some of the content within the Interactive Slide may not appear in the printed version.
   
   
4. PowerPoint Live in Teams: Interactive Slides don't currently appear to work as expected when presenting through PowerPoint Live in Microsoft Teams. A quick workaround is to share the PowerPoint application or your screen instead. It would be great if Microsoft could confirm whether support for PowerPoint Live is planned.
   
   
5. Accessibility: It would be helpful to understand how screen readers and other accessibility technologies interact with the embedded HTML/JavaScript content used within Interactive Slides. Microsoft confirmation on the expected accessibility experience would be appreciated.
   
   
6. Copilot understanding Interactive Slide content: It would also be useful to understand whether Copilot can access and interpret all the content within an Interactive Slide when the presentation is referenced or uploaded to Copilot Chat. Given that some of the content is contained within the embedded interactive experience rather than standard PowerPoint objects, can Copilot see and reason over all of that content? Microsoft confirmation here would be useful.
   
   
7. SharePoint Search and content discovery: There is a similar question around SharePoint Search and Microsoft 365 search experiences. If content is contained within the embedded interactive experience rather than standard PowerPoint objects, is that content indexed and discoverable through search? It would be great if Microsoft could confirm how Interactive Slide content is handled by enterprise search and indexing.

Overall, we're very impressed with Interactive Slides. They bring some fantastic new possibilities to PowerPoint and allow for much richer and more engaging presentations. These aren't necessarily reasons not to use them, but they're important considerations for organizations looking at collaboration, accessibility, printing, presenting through Teams, Copilot, search and the ongoing management of presentations.