Using Copilot in PowerPoint

This course is for business professionals across marketing, sales, operations, HR, customer support, and office administration who regularly create presentations for updates, pitches, and training. Students should be comfortable with core PowerPoint skills, including adding slides, basic formatting, and presenting. No prior experience with Copilot, AI tools, or graphic design is required.

• Explain what Copilot in PowerPoint can and cannot do, and distinguish it from Copilot Chat and Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Confirm that Copilot is active in PowerPoint and prepare source material that produces stronger first drafts.
• Write prompts that state the audience, purpose, scope, and desired presentation shape.
• Generate, review, and refine presentations from a topic, prompt, outline, Word document, notes, or PDF.
• Add, remove, reorder, and reorganize slides using clear conversational requests.
• Use Copilot to create and improve status updates, pitch decks, meeting recap decks, speaker notes, and audience-specific summaries.
• Request and refine design recommendations, then decide when an image, text, or chart best supports the message.
• Apply responsible-use habits for permissions, sensitive content, factual accuracy, brand fit, and final review.

Foundations of Copilot in PowerPoint

What Copilot in PowerPoint does and does not do; Copilot in PowerPoint vs. Copilot Chat vs. Microsoft 365 Copilot; licensing and activation; preparing clear outlines, source documents, and prompts; grounded vs. general answers.

Hands-on practice: Activate Copilot, create a draft from a prompt, and compare a vague prompt with a well-prepared one.

From Idea to Draft Deck

The anatomy of a strong prompt; audience, purpose, and shape; generating a presentation from a prompt or supplied outline; reviewing the proposed outline; refining through follow-up; prompting for business functions.

Hands-on practice: Build and improve presentation drafts for sales, marketing, operations, HR, or support scenarios.

Editing, Organizing & Formatting Slides with Copilot

Adding, removing, reordering, and splitting slides; recognizing slide types; reviewing inherited decks; diagnosing text, structure, and formatting problems; choosing the right level of review for a generated change.

Hands-on practice: Restructure a draft deck, review an inherited deck, and confirm changes slide by slide.

Building Decks from Existing Content

Turning Word documents, notes, and PDFs into draft presentations; drafting speaker notes; tailoring tone and depth for different audiences; combining multiple sources.

Hands-on practice: Create a deck from a source document, develop speaker notes, and retone a technical deck for leadership.

Using Copilot for Everyday Business Tasks

Recurring status and weekly report decks; sales and pitch support; meeting recap decks; pre-presentation checks; repeatable routines.

Hands-on practice: Build and update a status deck, tighten a pitch deck, and run a pre-presentation review.

Visual Storytelling with Copilot

Design recommendations by prompt; conversational design refinements; choosing images, text, and data; readability and common visual design mistakes.

Hands-on practice: Redesign a slide, compare image-led and text-led treatments, and check a design for readability.

Using Copilot Responsibly

Data sensitivity and permissions; known limitations; personal verification habits; prompting best-practices recap.

Hands-on practice: Improve earlier prompts and commit to a verification habit for future presentations.

Students should be comfortable with core PowerPoint skills, including adding slides, basic formatting, and presenting. No prior experience with Copilot, AI tools, or graphic design is required. Each student must have access to Microsoft PowerPoint through a work account with the Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on activated for PowerPoint; Copilot Chat alone does not provide the in-app features used in this course.

Using Copilot effectively in PowerPoint is less about finding a single feature and more about building sound prompting and review habits. An instructor is available in real time to help students turn a rough request into a usable deck, assess whether a suggested change makes sense, and apply the practical judgment that AI cannot replace.

Students receive a detailed guide and hands-on exercises they can continue to use after class, plus post-class instructor support. That makes it easier to carry the skills from the workshop into the next presentation they need to create at work.