Work Smarter: Copilot Productivity Tips for Creating Presentations

Here’s the unfortunate news: collecting information from various sources and creating presentations with that information can be a very time-consuming task for your sales & marketing employees. Whether it's personalizing sales presentations or converting financial data into executive briefs, your employees can spend countless hours each week crafting engaging slide decks that reflect your brand's identity.

But here’s the good news: Copilot in PowerPoint can reduce the time your team spends on these tasks. Instead, they can spend that time on more impactful work, like building relationships with potential customers and making critical decisions based on the insights they’ve collected.

As a marketer, I understand the challenges of creating time-consuming presentations in PowerPoint. This week, I'd like to share with you three specific tips for using Copilot in PowerPoint to help you create compelling slides with ease.

Let’s jump right in!

Tip 1: Create presentations using brand templates

If your company uses an existing slide template, you can create a presentation using Copilot in PowerPoint that leverages that theme so you stay aligned with your brand.

First, open an existing presentation with your theme or create a new presentation using a theme or template from File > New or Office.com.

An image of the PowerPoint home screen with options to create a blank presentation or choose a themed presentation.

Then within PowerPoint, select the Copilot button in the Home tab of the ribbon and either enter your prompt or select “create presentation about” to create a first draft of your presentation using your theme or template.

An image of how to access Copilot from the PowerPoint ribbon.   An image of Copilot in PowerPoint prompt options with a red box around the "Create a presentation about.." prompt.

You can then use the prompt in Copilot in PowerPoint to quickly add new slides to your presentation while maintaining your existing theme or template. For example, you could enter a prompt that says, “Add an agenda slide.” Or, if you wanted to address the pain points of a potential customer’s industry, you could type “Add a slide about the top 5 challenges of the health care industry.”

Read more about using your organization’s branding with Copilot in PowerPoint.

Tip 2: Create presentations from Word & PDF documents

If you have an existing Word or PDF document, you can instantly create compelling slides using that content. Point Copilot in PowerPoint to your document, and it will generate slides, apply layouts, and create speaker notes for you – all in minutes.

Select the Copilot button in the Home tab of the ribbon and click or type “Create presentation from file”. If the document you want from the picker doesn’t appear, you can start typing any part of the filename to search for it or type a front slash (/) to cause it to pop up.

An image of how to access Copilot from the PowerPoint ribbon.   An image of Copilot in PowerPoint prompt options with a red box around the "Create a presentation from [file]" prompt.

Copilot works best with well-structured Word documents that are less than 24 MB. Use Word Styles to help Copilot understand your document’s structure and how to convert it into presentation slides. If there are images you would like included in your presentation, be sure to include them in your Word document. Once you’ve chosen your document, select “Send” and Copilot will draft your presentation for you! You can then edit it to suit your needs.

Read more about using existing documents to create presentations using Copilot in PowerPoint.

Tip 3: Add images to your presentations

Copilot in PowerPoint can make your presentations more visually compelling as well. Use it to suggest stock images for your presentation by using the Copilot prompt to “Add an image” related to your topic, and it will go through the stock images and select an image to add from that collection.

You can also use the web version of Microsoft Copilot to create unique, new images for your presentation. Ask Copilot to “Create an image” and it will create an AI-generated image that you can insert into your slides. The more specific your prompt is, the better result you’ll get. For example, use longer, more descriptive prompts with adjectives, locations and artistic styles such as “digital art” or “photorealistic.”

An image of a dog wearing sunglasses

Read more about adding images to your presentations with Copilot in PowerPoint.

How do you use Copilot in your day-to-day? Let us know in the comments!