Exercise (optional) - Build a presentation from start to finish
Exercise
Imagine you're a marketing manager at a company called Contoso. Your team is preparing for an important client meeting where you need to present the company's strategy for a new Chai Tea product line to be sold in Latin America Your goal is to create a compelling presentation that highlights the product's features, benefits, and use cases, while ensuring it adheres to the company's branding standards. You've already developed a business plan for this product, and want to use that content when preparing for your meeting. You need to collaborate with your team and get the presentation reviewed by your manager before the meeting.
By the end of this exercise, you'll be able to create a new presentation, based on a Word document, insert an image, edit text, organize the presentation, incorporate corporate branding standards, and send the draft presentation to your manager for review using Copilot in PowerPoint.
Download sample file
Throughout this exercise, we'll craft prompts for Microsoft 365 Copilot that reference this file. Download and save the following file to your OneDrive folder before you continue.
Promotion Plan for Chai Tea in Latin America.docx
Create a new presentation based on a Word document
Open PowerPoint from your browser by opening the Microsoft Edge browser and navigating to the PowerPoint online app.
Select the Copilot on-screen option, located on the top-left corner of the empty slide, then select Create a new presentation with file from the menu to generate a draft presentation.
Select the Promotion Plan for Chai Tea in Latin America.docx file from the drop-down list. Alternately, type the first few letters of the file name after the forward slash that appears in the dialog. If the file name doesn't populate (it may take time for your files to sync before they're available), select Reference files (paperclip icon) and select the file.
Select the right arrow (Send) button to submit your prompt.
Copilot displays a presentation outline showing the potential slides and bullet points to be included on each slide.
Review the suggested topic and select Generate slides to continue. Copilot generates slides and content for each. The presentation may display results in either the Slide Sorter or Editing (Normal) view.
Copilot starts drafting the structure for the proposed presentation. You can add, remove, or reorder the proposed topics. You can optionally also select Image Settings to choose the images Copilot uses to create the slides.
Review the slides and select Keep it to continue.
While this is a great start, you want to personalize the presentation a bit more for your delivery. Let's see how to improve the content.
Ask Copilot to help you create an additional slide
Since our audience includes individuals with varying levels of familiarity with our company and its offerings, let's add a slide that provides a brief history of chai tea.
Let's first change the view in PowerPoint, if necessary. Select View -> Editing view (Normal).
Return to the Home ribbon view.
Open the Copilot pane, select Web grounded data, and enter the following prompt:
Can you provide a brief history of chai tea?
Copilot responds with a great summary of the history of chai tea, sourced from public web sites.
Copilot Chat is great for asking questions, summarizing or researching (web/work) information, but it doesn't have the capability to edit/shape our presentation.
Let's ask Copilot to help create a slide about the history of Chai Tea. Go to the first slide, select the Copilot icon (top-left corner of any slide) and select Add a slide.
In the dialog that appears, add the following context:
the history of chai tea.
Once the slide is generated, select to Keep it.
Now you've added depth to your presentation, and it's a great way to increase interest from your meeting participants. Let's look at the presentation now, and see how we can make it even more powerful.
Insert an image
While Copilot includes images as it creates slides, you may want to add or edit an image to be more specific to your presentation. You can ask Copilot to include an image from your approved corporate library, provided your administrator has set the appropriate configurations, or generate an image based on an idea you have.
Let's ask Copilot Chat to create a new image.
Enter the following prompt in the Copilot Chat pane:
Create an image featuring a person sipping a warm cup of tea.
Note
Feel free to experiment with your own prompt to generate an image you think would work best for the presentation. The more details you provide, the better.
Copilot creates and displays an image that matches your request.
Copy and paste the new image to replace the default image on the History of chai tea slide.
Edit the text
As you're reviewing the presentation, you may decide the text Copilot generated isn't quite right for you. Use Copilot to help you refine the text on your slides. For instance, you can type Edit the text on this slide to make it more concise or Make this text more engaging for the reader Let's see how:
Navigate to the slide containing the text you may want to edit.
Select the text box to modify, then select the Copilot (pen) icon next to it. Enter the following prompt in the dialog that appears:
Expand this text to include additional details.
Review the suggestions provided by Copilot, then select Keep it to update the selected text.
Organize the presentation
As you're reviewing the presentation, you may find that the topics in your presentation need to be more clearly identified. You can use Copilot in PowerPoint to inject this clarity.
In the Copilot pane, select the Work tab, then enter the following prompt:
Give me tips to improve my presentation, both in general and slide-by-slide.
Copilot responds, providing general suggestions along with suggestions for each slide. You can use these tips to either manually modify the content in your deck, or use the in-app Copilot features you've explored in this exercise to improve your presentation.
And just like that, you've all set to impress with a polished presentation.