Exercise: Create a sales presentation using Copilot in PowerPoint
Copilot in PowerPoint is a powerful tool that can help Sales professionals create and organize presentations. It can transform existing written documents into decks complete with speaker notes and sources or start a new presentation from a simple prompt or outline. With Copilot in PowerPoint, they can focus on the content of their presentations, while the tool takes care of the design and formatting.
Copilot can also help presenters summarize their presentations, providing a bulleted summary of the key points. This feature can be useful when they must quickly understand the content of a presentation or share the main ideas with their team.
In addition, Copilot in PowerPoint can generate new design ideas for presentations, suggesting the best design options based on the content. This feature can save presenters time and effort, allowing them to focus on delivering their message effectively. Copilot can also help Sales professionals create a new presentation from an existing Word document, generating slides, applying layouts, and choosing a theme for them.
Exercise
As the Sales and Marketing Director at Contoso, Ltd., you must provide a presentation to your Sales team regarding the company's hottest selling product, Contoso Protein Plus shake. The presentation should analyze the market trend report that your Marketing team created for the product. Perform the following steps to have Copilot in PowerPoint create your slide presentation based on the information in the Market Trend Report - Protein Shake.docx file, which you download at the start of this exercise.
Select the following link to download a copy of Market Trend Report - Protein Shake.
Once the download is complete, open File Explorer and move the file from your Downloads folder to a folder in your OneDrive account.
In this exercise, you access the document from the Most Recently Used file list. To get the file to appear in the Most Recently Used (MRU) list, open the document and then close it.
If you have a Microsoft 365 tab open in your Microsoft Edge browser, then select it now; otherwise, open a new tab and enter the following URL: https://www.office.com
On the Microsoft 365 navigation pane, select PowerPoint.
In PowerPoint, open a new blank presentation.
Select the Copilot option on the right side of the ribbon.
In the Copilot pane that appears, several predefined prompts are available for you to choose from. Select the Create presentation from file prompt.
Above the prompt field at the bottom of the Copilot pane, a Suggestions window appears that contains the three most recently used files. If the Market Trend Report - Protein Shake.docx file appears in the MRU list, then select it. Otherwise, open the file in Word, select the Share button above the ribbon, select the Copy Link option from the drop-down menu, and then in this prompt field in the Copilot pane in PowerPoint, paste in the link following the forward slash (Create presentation from file /).
Select the Send icon.
This prompt triggered Copilot to create a slide presentation based on the document. In doing so, it first displayed the outline of the presentation. Then it displayed a separate window showing a bulleted list of some of the changes that it made to the presentation based on the document.
Review the slides once Copilot finished creating the presentation.
To review the speaker notes, select the View tab and then select the Notes button if it isn't already selected. If it's already selected and you can't see the notes, then drag the bottom of the slide window up to show the notes. Verify the speaker notes include the key points that you want to make during the presentation.
Select the Home tab and then select the Designer button, which appears to the left of the Copilot button. The Designer pane offers samples of different designs for the current slide being displayed. Change to a different slide in the presentation and note how the Designer pane generates different design options for that slide. Select one of the design options to have PowerPoint replace the current slide with the new design. This feature isn't Copilot-related. It's available in PowerPoint when you have a Microsoft 365 subscription, but it's nice to try it here if you haven't used it before.
Now let's see what else Copilot can do. Select the Copilot button to open the Copilot pane.
In the Copilot pane, note the section that says Here are some things you can try. Copilot displays several tasks that it can perform on the presentation. Select the Organize this presentation button.
Review what Copilot did in organizing the presentation. For example, it may have grouped the slides into sections and then added some new section title slides. If so, locate the new slides that it created and review them.
Above the prompt field, Copilot displays questions related to the presentation. The purpose of these questions is two-fold. You can select a question and have Copilot generate an answer, which you can then copy and paste into the speaker notes for an applicable slide. Or you can create a Question and Answer (Q&A) slide and copy and paste in the answers to all these questions in the speaker notes. In doing so, you can use these questions and answers to prepare for the Q&A portion of the presentation. For example, it may have a button that asks something like: What caused the rise in demand for Contoso Protein Plus? Or it may ask something like: What are the key factors behind the hype of Contoso Protein Plus? Review the questions that you see, and select one of them to see what happens.
When you select any of these questions, Copilot generates an answer to the question and provides a Copy option at the bottom of the answer window. In doing so, you can select the Copy option and then paste this answer in the speaker notes for any slide in which this text would make an appropriate note. Try it now. Select a question, copy the answer, then go to an appropriate slide and in the speaker notes, enter Ctrl+V to paste in the note.
Note the Refresh button that appears between the suggested questions and the prompt field. Select this Refresh button.
In doing so, note how Copilot generated a new set of questions. You can continue to refresh the questions by selecting the Refresh button until you see a question that you want to address in the presentation. You can then select the question, copy the Copilot-generated answer, and paste it into the speaker notes of the slide of your choosing. Once Copilot can't think of any new questions to offer, it starts repeating the list of questions from the start.
You now want Copilot to create a slide at the end of the presentation for a Q&A session. Enter the following prompt and select the Send icon:
Add a slide at the end of the presentation for Q&A.
If Copilot returned a message indicating that it was unable to generate the slide, try entering the prompt again. Sometimes when Copilot can't complete a task, a good practice is to repeat the request. In our testing, asking the same question a second time usually worked. However, when repeating the prompt a second time didn't work, we remembered the prompting best practice to be very specific and iterate, iterate, iterate. So then we entered the following prompt, which this time worked:
Add a slide at the very end of the presentation for a Question and Answer (Q&A) session.
Review the Q&A slide that Copilot created. Now let's try one final thing. You decide to compile a list of potential questions that you can prepare for during the Q&A session. Enter the following prompt to see if Copilot can add all of its suggested questions to the speaker notes on the Q&A slide:
In the speaker notes of the Q&A slide that you just created, add a list of possible questions that may be asked regarding this presentation.
In all our testing, Copilot was unable to complete this task. Sometimes it displayed the following message: I completed some of your request, but I'll need more practice before I can do everything in it. What else can I help you with? While the message says that it "completed some of the request," no questions appeared in the speaker notes of the Q&A slide, nor did they appear in any other slide. Other times, it displayed this message: You can find the "Notes" feature on the View tab of the ribbon, but I can't access it directly. Would you like me to show you where it is?
Did you receive either of these messages or a similar one, or did Copilot complete this task?
If Copilot completed this task, then enter a prompt that asks it to generate the answer to each of the suggested questions and add the answers to their respective questions in the speaker notes of the Q&A slide. See if Copilot can complete that task as well.
If Copilot was unable to complete this task, then it just shows that it's still a work in progress. While it may not be able to complete everything that you want at this point in time, keep checking to see if it eventually can. This scenario is another example of the best practice that you learned in earlier training: Understand Copilot's limitations.
If Copilot was unable to add questions to the Q&A slide, then try this workaround. Enter the following prompt that asks it to generate a list of questions:
What kind of questions do you think participants may ask during the Q&A session?
Review the questions that Copilot created. Select the Copy button at the bottom of the window, and then paste them (Ctrl+V) into the speaker notes of the Q&A slide.
While the remaining training exercises in this module don't use this presentation, you can either discard it or save it if you to retain a copy for future reference.