Work Smarter: Copilot Productivity Tips

We have bad news for you: Gathering information from various sources and creating presentations based on that information can be a very time-consuming task for sales and marketing staff. Whether you’re personalizing a sales presentation or turning financial data into an executive briefing, your employees can spend countless hours each week creating compelling slide decks that reflect your brand identity.

But there’s good news: PowerPoint’s Copilot feature can help your team reduce the time it takes to do these tasks. Instead, they can invest that time in more impactful tasks, like building relationships with prospects and making important decisions based on the insights they gather.

As a marketer, I understand the challenges of creating time-consuming presentations in PowerPoint. This week, I want to share three specific tips to help you create engaging slides easily using Copilot in PowerPoint.

Let’s get started right away!

Tip 1: Create a presentation using a brand template

If your company uses existing slide templates, you can use Copilot in PowerPoint to create presentations that utilize those themes, so they stay consistent with your brand.

First, open an existing presentation that has a theme applied, or create a new presentation by choosing File > New or using a theme or template on Office.com.

Image of the PowerPoint home screen with options to create a blank presentation or select a themed presentation.

Then, in PowerPoint, select the Copilot button on the Home tab of the Ribbon and either type in the prompt or select “Create Presentation” to create a first draft of your presentation using a theme or template.

Image showing how to access Copilot from the PowerPoint ribbon. In the PowerPoint prompt options, there is a red box around the “Create a presentation for…” prompt in the Copilot image.

You can then use prompts in Copilot in PowerPoint to quickly add new slides to your presentation while maintaining your existing theme or template.. For example, you might type a prompt like “Add an agenda slide.” Or, if you want to solve a problem for your prospect’s industry, you might type “Add a slide on the top 5 challenges in the healthcare industry.”

Read more Learn how to use your organization’s branding with Copilot in PowerPoint.

Tip 2: Create presentations from Word and PDF documents

If you have an existing Word or PDF document, you can use that content to instantly create compelling slides. Just point Copilot to your document in PowerPoint and it will create slides, apply layouts, and create speaker notes—all in minutes.

On the Home tab of the ribbon, select the Copilot button and click or type “Create Presentation from File.” If the document you want does not appear in the picker, you can search for it by typing any part of the file name, or type a forward slash (/) to display it in a pop-up.

Image showing how to access Copilot from the PowerPoint ribbon. In the PowerPoint prompt options, there is a red box around “Create Presentation” in the Copilot image. [file]” Immediate.

Copilot works best with well-structured Word documents under 24MB. Use Word styles to help Copilot understand the structure of your document and how to convert it into presentation slides. If you have any images you want to include in your presentation, be sure to include them in your Word document. After you select your document and choose “Send”, Copilot will create a draft of your presentation for you! You can then edit it to suit your needs.

Read more Learn how to use Copilot in PowerPoint to create presentations leveraging existing documents.

Tip 3: Add images to your presentation

Copilot in PowerPoint can also make your presentation more visually appealing. When you use the “Add image” prompt in Copilot to suggest stock images for your presentation, it will browse through the stock images and choose an image to add from its collection.

You can also use the web version of Microsoft Copilot to create unique, new images for your presentations. 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, the better the results. For example, use longer, more descriptive prompts that include adjectives, locations, and artistic styles, such as “digital art” or “photorealistic.”

Image of a dog wearing sunglasses

Read more Learn how to add images to your presentation using Copilot in PowerPoint.

How do you use Copilot in your daily life? Let us know in the comments!