Powerpoint

- [Instructor] Copilot in PowerPoint is an incredibly useful tool to have on hand whether you need to create a new presentation or edit or add slides to an existing presentation. And again, as we continue to see, the more you include the ingredients of good prompts that we covered, the better and more useful your results will be. Let's say you need to create a completely new presentation. Doing this the traditional manual way can be pretty time consuming. But let's see how Copilot can get us started. Now you can create your presentation starting with a blank slide like we see here. And Copilot will automatically select a template style for your presentation, which is great if you really have no idea where to start. But if you know of a template you want to use, or if you have a template that your company uses for your presentations, you can start by selecting a template for Copilot to base your new presentation on. I'll go to File, New, which is where we can browse our different templates. And I'll just select one like Business plan presentation, and we'll create that. So like with most templates, we can see the thumbnails of the different slide layouts it includes here in the thumbnail panel. Or I can come up to the Home ribbon and click New Slide to see them here. So traditionally I could start working on these slides and customizing them for my presentation now. But let's have Copilot build a new presentation from scratch using this template. I'll open up the Copilot pane. So like we've seen in some of the other M365 apps so far, we have the prompt area here at the bottom of the pane, as well as some prompt suggestions that show up here near the top. These suggestions will change depending on whether you're working with a new presentation or an existing one. In this case, I want to create a new presentation. So I click Create a presentation about..., and you can see that starts the prompt for me down here. So now I just need to fill in what this presentation is about. Again, let's follow some of the rules of good prompt writing so Copilot will generate something as close to the final product I want as possible. Let's say this is going to be a presentation about best practices for writing a self-evaluation for annual reviews. Now, I could just leave the prompt as is and Copilot will generate a pretty good presentation. But I have other details I want to include to provide context and guidance. For example, I want it to be a short presentation. So let's specify, "Keep the presentation to a maximum of 10 slides." And let's also tell Copilot to "Please keep the tone casual and reassuring." All right, let's send that prompt and see what we get. Now, when you use an existing template, you'll be informed that this will replace your existing slides and that you may want to save a copy first. In this case, I'm working with a template that didn't have any information that I needed to keep, so I didn't need to make a copy of it beforehand. But if you're working with an existing presentation, maybe a company slide deck that you want to base this new presentation on, make sure you save a copy of that presentation and then open that copy to work from. In this case, I'm going to click Yes, please to allow Copilot to continue. And here's our new presentation. You can see that Copilot has followed the prompt instructions to limit the presentation to 10 slides. And if we browse through these, you can see that it's kept a pretty casual and reassuring tone. It's also added all of these images to go along with each slide. So this is much closer to what I want than what I would've gotten if I had just used a basic prompt of, "Create a presentation about writing self-evaluations." Just a few more sentences gave me a much more useful set of slides to start from. Notice that Copilot has even generated notes on each slide. So I'm already off to a pretty good start and we can continue using Copilot to add to our deck. For example, I'll add another prompt of, "Add a slide at the end on using the company SharePoint to find resources for further help with self-evaluations." We'll send that and there's our new slide complete with content, image, and notes. Notice Copilot even reminds us that we can use Designer to select different layouts for the individual slides. All right, lastly, let's go back to the Copilot pane, and let's have Copilot further refine this presentation by telling it to "Organize this presentation." And now Copilot has organized the deck into collapsible sections. And it's even added a couple more slides to round out the sections. So I have a pretty great start in this presentation after just a couple of minutes and a few detailed and conversational prompts with Copilot. To see more of what Copilot can do in PowerPoint, be sure to check out the course called "Copilot and PowerPoint: From Prompt to Presentation."