If you've completely missed the hype surrounding Microsoft Copilot, then quite frankly, you must have been living under a rock . Now, despite the hype that came along with the release of Copilot, it did come with a whole heap of caveats.
And one of these caveats was pretty much a deal breaker when it comes to using Copilot for the majority of people. Because when Copilot was first released, it was only made available to organisations with 300 users or more, so unless you bought 300 licenses, you weren't going to be able to use Copilot.
So that completely wiped out most people, including myself. Now, the absolutely Thrilling news that has come out of Microsoft over the last few days is that they are now expanding the offering. So Copilot is now available to small and medium sized organisations and also Microsoft 365 users. Now, this video isn't about that.
It's not about how do I get it? Am I eligible to get it? So what I would suggest you do is go to this website just here and have a read up. Now, what exactly is this video about? Well, it is about Copilot in PowerPoint because so far, and I've had a little dabble amongst all of the applications, I found it most useful in PowerPoint.
And we could do some really cool things. So I thought I would give it a demo for you. Let's dive in. So I'm just starting with a blank presentation. I just have a title slide loaded up on the screen. Now, if you have access to Copilot, you're going to find it on the Home tab, all the way over on the right hand side.
Notice you'll find it here, cuddled up with the Designer button. And that is because Designer is also an AI utility that's been around in PowerPoint for the last few years. And these actually work really nicely together. They're like the index match of the AI world. So let's clickety click the co pilot button.
And what you'll see is it's going to load a pane on the right hand side. And if you've used applications like ChatGPT, then this will look reasonably familiar. We have some suggested prompts that we can use at the top here. We only have three at the moment. And then we have our prompt area down at the bottom where we can ask questions.
We can get it to build presentations, all of that fun stuff. So the first thing we're going to do here is we're going to get Copilot to build us a presentation. So I'm going to click on create a presentation and then we just need to be really specific about the type of presentation we want it to create.
And that's the thing with prompts. The more detail you give it, the better result you're going to get. So let's add our prompt, create a presentation with 10 slides
about the Advantages of using Microsoft Teams for collaboration. Let's send it through. Now I'm going to try not to cut this video too much because I think it is actually really important for you to be able to see how long Copilot actually takes. Now when it's building something like a presentation it has to pull together a lot of information and a lot of slides so it's understandable that it takes a little bit longer and I don't really mind that.
However, if I'm using Copilot to do things like delete a single slide and it's taking a minute, I would just say do it manually. But for this particular purpose, check out what we have. I basically have created an entire presentation within about a minute. Now, if you can't see the advantage of that, then you should probably call an ambulance and check yourself into the hospital.
Now, I'm not saying that these slides are going to look exactly as you want them to look, but this is where Designer can come in and save the day. So if we go to this first slide and click on Designer, this is going to generate some slide ideas based on what we have on the slide. And we can go through and we can choose a completely different layout.
Now, I actually quite like this layout. Let's go to slide two. Again, it's going to generate more slide ideas. And maybe I want this one to look like that. And I can carry on going through my slides. Now, of course, if you don't like the imagery that's been used, you can switch these out as well. So if we click on the image just here, I can go to For example, picture format, change picture from this device, and I just have a picture saved off that I'm going to insert in here.
So everything is still completely customisable. But in terms of just getting information into a presentation, Copilot is proving to be absolutely brilliant. Let's close down Designer, go back to Copilot. What else can we do in here? Well, I could ask it to do things like delete slides. So maybe I want it to delete slide 10 from the presentation.
Let's hit enter. Now, as I mentioned, for things like this, it's probably quicker just to go in and press the delete key, but I just really want you to understand the types of things that you can do. And you can see, like magic, slide 10 has been deleted. And another thing that I really like is the ability to summarise our presentations.
So what I could say here is. Summarise this presentation. So Copilot is going to go away. It's going to take a look at all of the information in my slides and it's going to output a really concise overview of my slide deck. And you can see just above here, it says here's a summary of the deck, the main ideas, and then we have the main headings and just a paragraph about each.
And notice we have references next to them so we can see which slides. The information has come from, so I could then click on the copy button. I could copy this into a Word document, a Teams channel, and I have a nice summary of my deck. Now, let's take a look at another example of how we can use Copilot.
This time, I have a Word document that contains some information about the solar system, and I want to create a presentation based off of this information. Now, my Word document is saved to OneDrive. I can click on the share button and choose to copy the link to this document. So the link has been copied.
Let's jump back to PowerPoint. Now what I can do is I can say that I want to create a presentation from a file. Now notice that it's popped up the solar system. That is my document. Now, if you don't have your file saved into the same OneDrive account that PowerPoint is using, you won't see your file listed under here.
But that doesn't matter, because as long as you have the link, remember we copied the link, you can simply paste it into the prompt area to link to that file. If I press Ctrl V, it's going to paste that link in, and then when I send that through, it's going to read that document, it's going to give me a summary, and then it's going to generate some slides.
So you can see here, it says, here's the outline for the presentation that I'm generating. We just have a short bullet pointed list. And now it's just generating all of the slides for the presentation. And I'm quite interested to see what it comes up with. And there we go. It's built a slightly crazy.
And of course, once again, we can go through to designer and we can choose a completely different design for these slides. And another thing that I think is brilliant is if we take a look at the notes area, I'm just going to drag it up. Notice that it automatically adds notes into the presentation. Now, the final example that I want to talk to you about is how we can utilise Copilot in our slides.
And use our company template at the same time. Now I'm just using one of the Microsoft templates just here. We're going to pretend that this is my company template. And I want to make sure that when Copilot builds my slides, it uses this template. So all you need to do is load the template up and then basically delete out all the slides.
So I'm going to click in the slide area, control a, and I'm going to press delete. I'm then going to open up Copilot. And I'm going to say, create a presentation about the Chelsea flower show. Let's send it through. And there we go. We have our slides. We have our imagery, but it's using our company template. So those are a few of the ways that I so far like to use Copilot in conjunction with PowerPoint.
