Almost a year ago, Microsoft announced Copilot to great fanfare. Copilot integrates ChatGPT and AI into Microsoft 365 (Office).
Many people are still waiting for it.
But I’m pleased to tell you that, as PowerPoint MVP (Most Valuable Professional, a Microsoft award), I have had access to it for a few weeks now and I can tell you about it. Even better, I’ll show you.
What can you do with Copilot in PowerPoint?
There are 3 main categories of tasks Copilot can do for you:
- Creating a presentation from scratch or from a document
- Editing a presentation, including re-organizing, replacing an image, and reformatting
- Getting help from Copilot, including how to do a task in PowerPoint, summarizing a presentation, and finding content
In this blog post, I’ll also cover some best practices for getting the best results and explain what Copilot can’t do, at least not yet.
One point to make clear is that you always have full control over your presentation. It’s just a regular .pptx file and you can edit it manually however you want.
Getting started with Copilot
To get Copilot, you can go here.
There’s a free version, but it doesn’t work in PowerPoint or the other 365 apps. It also includes image creation in Designer, and if you’re signed in with a Microsoft 365 business or enterprise account you get some additional privacy/data protection features. It seems to me like it’s mostly like the free version of ChatGPT.
Then, there’s Copilot Pro. It gives you some bonus features in Edge, but if you’re a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscriber it also gives you Copilot integrated into Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and OneNote. This is $20 per user per month.
Finally, there’s Copilot for Microsoft 365 which lets you use Copilot with PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, and Teams — as long as you have a Microsoft 365 account. And it includes other Microsoft apps and services that have (or will have) Copilot, and integration with the Microsoft Graph (your business data in Microsoft 365). That’s $30 per user per month.
At one time, you had to buy a certain minimum number of seats but that’s no longer true. Anyone can sign up.
Copilot for Microsoft 365 is what I’m showing you here.
Opening the Copilot pane
Once you have Copilot, when you open PowerPoint, you’ll see the Copilot button at the right end of the Home tab. (By the way, it works differently in Word. There, you see the Copilot prompt on your page automatically.)
Click the button to open the pane, which you see above. There are some suggestions at the top but you’ll spend most of your time at the bottom, in the prompt area. You can type up to 2,000 characters in this box.
On the right side of the prompt box are 3 buttons:
- View Prompts gives you some suggestions for prompts
- Microphone lets you dictate prompts. Be careful with this, because if you aren’t precise and clear, you won’t get the results you want
- Send is like pressing Enter and it submits your prompt
Creating a presentation from scratch
You can create a presentation from scratch by describing what you want in a prompt. In this video, you see me prompt Copilot to create a presentation about gamification. (I didn’t narrate it, so there’s no sound.)
What did you think of it? Considering that my final prompt was, “Create a presentation with 6-8 slides about what gamification for corporate online courses is and why a Training Department might want to use gamification in it in-house online courses,” I think it’s missing the first part completely, a definition of gamification.
Also, although it’s a good-looking presentation, I object to all the bullets. Unfortunately, Copilot can’t use SmartArt. More about that later.
Editing a presentation
You can open an existing presentation and use Copilot for it. In this case, I’ll use the one I just created and edit it.
As I indicated, I was unhappy that the presentation didn’t include a definition of gamification. My next prompt was this and it got me a new slide as you see here.
That was OK, but I needed some examples. So I went to the slide with the training listing benefits. You can see my prompt and Copilot’s answer here,
You do want to tell Copilot which slide to work on, but still, its response was terrible!
One lesson you need to learn with Copilot (and ChatGPT for that matter) is to have a conversation with it. If you don’t get the results you want rephrase your prompt.
So I tried in a different way. I was more specific and that worked!
Here you see the prompt and the resulting slide. Much better, right?
Copilot creates slides using the same resources that the Designer pane uses. It will periodically recommend that you use Designer, as you see above. When I clicked “Designer,” the Designer pane opened and gave me some variations. This isn’t really a Copilot feature at all, as you have that option even without Copilot.
You can see the options on the right. You can click any one of them to substitute that design for your current design.
You can continue to use prompts to:
- Rewrite text
- Reformat text
- Add or delete slides
- Reduce the amount of text on a slide (divide a slide into multiple slides)
- Insert a picture
- and more…
For example, if a slide title is in title case (initial caps) and you want sentence case, use the prompt, “Change the title of this slide to sentence case” and Copilot will do it for you.
However, if I ask, “Change all the slide titles in this presentation to sentence case,” Copilot responds, “You can find the “Change Case” feature on the Home tab of the ribbon, but I can’t access it directly. Would you like me to show you where it is?”
Well, I know where it is but that would require me to go into each slide separately. I left a frown about that one. (See later in the blog post for how to do that.)
One slide had a picture of dice and to me that represented gambling, which I didn’t think was relevant to gamification. Here’s what happened with I tried to fix it.
I wrote, “Please change the picture on this slide to a picture that doesn’t represent gambling”
Copilot said: OK, here you go. The picture on the slide has been replaced with a non-gambling image. For other options, try using the insert tab in the ribbon.
But it was another picture of dice!
I wrote, “No, dice represent gambling. Please change the image to something game-related but without dice.”
Copilot said: “OK, here you go. The image has been changed to a game board with pieces and cards, but no dice.”
This one was much better. So you see how you need to have a back-and-forth conversation?
Creating a presentation from a document
Copilot lets you work on your desktop version of PowerPoint (as well as the web version, which I don’t like to use), but the files have to be in OneDrive or Sharepoint, that is, online.
When creating a presentation from a Word document, here are the steps I use:
- Open that document where it resides online
- Click the Share button and copy the link.
- In the CoPilot pane, click Create Presentation from File.
- At the bottom of the pane, you’ll see a prompt for the link. Paste it there.
By the way, in Word, I could have used Copilot to ask for a description of brainstorming and its value. But I wrote this myself. Here’s the document I created. You can see that it’s very simple, with no formatting.
Copilot then gave me an outline in the pane and created this presentation.
There are problems with this. It certainly doesn’t need an agenda and the conclusion is too long for such a short topic, but it’s a start.
I noticed that one slide said that during brainstorming you “throw out ideas,” which I thought was misleading. (My fault, of course, since that’s what I wrote in the document.) I asked for alternative suggestions but it couldn’t help me. But when I told it to replace “throw out ideas” with “suggest ideas,” it made the substitution.
Getting help from Copilot
Here are some ways you can get Copilot to help you…
- You can ask Copilot to summarize a presentation. Of course, this isn’t so valuable with something you created yourself since you already know what’s in it, but it’s a great help when you are working on another person’s presentation. Even for your own presentation, you can use the summary to tell colleagues about it, such as putting the summary in an email.
- You can ask Copilot how to do something in PowerPoint. Usually the answers are accurate. For example, if I ask how to access SmartArt, it says, “You can find the “Convert to SmartArt Graphic” feature on the Home tab of the ribbon, but I can’t access it directly. Would you like me to show you where it is?” It offers a Show Me button that then points to the SmartArt icon on the Home tab.
- You can ask Copilot to find content. I asked it to display the slide discussing pitfalls of gamification. It didn’t display the slide but told me it was on Slide 8, which was correct.
- You can ask Copilot to delete a slide. Give it some information to identify which slide you want to delete. (You can always undo that action.)
You can also ask Copilot to add a slide. At the top of the pane, Add a Slide is one of the options. Copilot starts the prompt for you at the bottom of the pane and you can describe what you want the slide to cover. I asked it to add a slide with case studies of gamification and here’s what it gave me:
- A course in Adobe Photoshop was gamified for online learning, and the average time on task increased by 50%.
- A sales training program at Microsoft was gamified, and employee participation improved by 60%.
- An electronic health records system was gamified at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and data entry accuracy increased by 42%.
- A cybersecurity training course at NCR Corporation was gamified, and learning outcomes improved by 35%.
So, of course, I asked for the source of the data and you can see its response above on the right, “Sorry, I don’t know of a way to do that.”
Don’t ever trust stats given by any AI source.
On the other hand, when I searched Bing for the first bullet point above, I got some other stats with footnotes that were links to pages containing the stats. That was much more useful.
Getting the best results from Copilot
I do want to say that Microsoft is continually improving Copilot. It’s much better than it was just a month ago. If you see a problem, report it! On the Help tab, click Feedback and then Report a Problem. (You can also give a compliment or make a suggestion there.)
Microsoft DOES look at these reports.
Here are some pointers:
- Make a copy of the slide if it has text on it that you don’t want to lose, and ask it to work on the copy
- When you want it to work on specific text, put it in quotation marks, or you can specify the slide title, for example, if that’s what you want it to work on.
- Give Copilot parameters, such as “create 6-8 slides” or “reduce the text on this slide to 3 bullet points.”
- When asking Copilot to generate content, start with a broad brush and then ask it to get more specific.
- Ask it to work on small segments of the content at a time. In PowerPoint, that often means one slide.
- Use quotation marks when you want Copilot to work on specific text.
- You can ask Copilot to write stories! When I asked it to write a story about how a team used brainstorming, here’s what I got:
+ A software development team was tasked with creating a new app for a client
+ They used brainstorming to generate ideas for the app’s features|
+ During the brainstorming session, team members suggested features that they had never considered before
+ The team evaluated the ideas and narrowed down the list to the most feasible and innovative ones
+The final product, which included many of the brainstormed features, was a huge success
Next Steps
If you don’t have Copilot at work, you can get it for $20 per month, which is worth a try. As I said, it’s improving constantly. Think how you might use it to create new presentations (think of them as instant drafts for you to work on) or improve existing ones.
I’m available for 1-on-1 consulting and training here.
What are your thoughts? Leave a comment!