If you've ever had the situation where your boss wants you to throw together a quick PowerPoint presentation 10 minutes before a meeting's due to start, and you are not utilising Copilot in PowerPoint, then you are missing out. So in this lesson, I'm gonna show you how you can create a fully fleshed out PowerPoint presentation that references existing files in under a couple of minutes, let's go. So I've opened up PowerPoint and we're gonna go straight to the File tab and to New. And what you are now seeing here is a Create with Copilot template for you to use. Now I know you've probably just skipped over this and gone to your blank presentation, but it's worth checking this out.
Let's click on it to open it up, and what you'll see is that we are presented with the now ever so familiar Copilot prompt box. And this is where we need to describe the presentation that we want Copilot to create. And remember, when you are prompting in, not just in PowerPoint, but in any of the applications, the more specific you are, the better.
For example, remember to tell Copilot what your role is. Who the audience is for the presentation. If you want a certain number of slides or what you want the tone to be like, and remember, you can even add reference files into your prompt. So if you have information stored off in, let's say, a Word document, maybe it's something like a sales pitch and you want to include that in your presentation, you can just attach the file.
So let's type in our prompt, and our prompt is gonna be a very simple one. Please use the reference file to create a slide deck of at least seven slides. The tone should be casual and suitable for a Gen Z audience. And now I'm going to attach a file, and there are a couple of ways that you can do this.
You can click on the reference files button just here, or you can press forward slash and that will pop open the files drop down on what you'll see in this list are the last 10 documents that you used. If you can't see the document that you want in here, you can click on this little button just here to attach cloud files.
So if we click on this, it's gonna open up a window and you can then go through and navigate to the folder where you have your file stored. There it is. How Netflix and Spotify knows you better than your friends. Let's select it to add it in. Now, just on this point, because this is a common issue that people come to me with, they will.
Click on reference files and they can't see the file that they want in here, and when they click on the attach cloud files button, it doesn't open a window. Now, that normally occurs when there is a discrepancy between where you have your files stored and the account that you are logged into PowerPoint with.
So, for example, I'm logged into PowerPoint under my business account, which means I can access my business OneDrive files. If I have the file that I want to use stored in a different OneDrive account that's attached to my personal email address, I'm not gonna be able to attach it in here. So just make sure that everything is consistent.
So now we have our prompt ready to go. Let's click on send and send it through. And you can see the PowerPoint is now generating my presentation topics. And this is going to be based on the document that contains the information. So here I get to make a few choices. I can choose my presentation style, and you can see that I have a few options.
I can click on show all to see more, and I can choose one of these. So let's just go for this one. Just here, Stock over print. Scroll down a bit further. We can now choose our image preferences. So Copilot will add imagery into your slide deck as well, which is really, really useful. And we can choose the style of image that we want to use in the presentation.
So I'm gonna say photo realistic, and then I'm gonna click, Generate slides and you can see it's going through and it's using the information in that document to build out my PowerPoint presentation in just a few moments. Think about how long it would take you to create all of these individual slides separately.
And there we go In a few seconds. I've now got a fully built PowerPoint presentation in the style that I specified. Now obviously you need to go through and you need to check these slides because it doesn't always get everything completely correct. For example, I can see in this first one just here that the text is a little bit too large.
Now it's gonna put you into Slide Sorter view. So if we go to the View ribbon and go to Normal, this is where we can come to make any changes to our slides. And you can see here that this text is probably a little bit too big, so we can very easily fix that by going to the home tab and just making it a little bit smaller.
And I'm just gonna go through, and I think that's about right, but these minor changes that you need to make are still going to be a lot quicker than creating this presentation from scratch. And of course, everything in here is also replaceable, so if you don't like some of these images, you can switch them out for your own images.
But I think you'll agree that if you just need to get something together quickly, Copilot can be a really useful tool for doing that.
