Transcripts
1. Course Introduction: In this course,
you'll learn how to use AI inside PowerPoint as a practical co creator that
helps you generate ideas, refine your message, and bring your slides to life
with greater impact. We'll cover how to
create new content quickly without starting
from a blank slide, rewrite and tighten
existing material, so every word earns its place. Improve layout and visual polish to make slides clearer
and more engaging, create and edit
visuals where they add real value and turn raw data into meaningful charts
and structured roadmaps. By the end, you'll
have a repeatable workflow for building sharper, more effective
presentations with Copilot.
2. Build a slide from a prompt: So here's how you can
create new content fast using Copilot and
AI inside PowerPoint. Copilot can be found at the bottom right
of your interface. If it's not there, you
can go to File Options, Co-Pilot and make
sure this is ticked. If it's not ticked,
you'll need to restart PowerPoint for
it to be available. So now we can click on Copilot. And for example, I can create
any slide I want from here, and once we have that,
we'll be able to edit it. So in this example,
I want a slide explaining the benefits of
switching to renewable energy. I'm going to write,
create a slide outlining the key business benefits of
adopting renewable energy. Copilot will take a few
minutes to create this, and it may ask you some
questions to help guide it, to create the right
content for your audience. I'm going to click on
General, and then for this, I'm going to click three to four key benefits and confirm. Copilot will then show you what it's doing with
some descriptions. In this example, it's
telling us which colors it's going to use and
that it's going to use icons and a
background image. A so now we have our slide, and this is all editable. So I can change, for
example, any of this text. I could change or move
the picture if I want to, and you can even
change these icons. Copilot will tell
you what it's done, give you a description of the different
elements it's put in, and it will also say what it could do to
further refine the slide. Often, the hardest part of making slides is
getting started, and this provides a structured
draft from nothing. It's important that you then tailor the content
to your needs. So in this example,
I could change the title something
slightly less generic, such as why our
business should switch to renewable energy.
Or whatever you want. Remember that AI isn't
doing the thinking for you, it's giving you a strong
first part that you can quickly refine,
reshape and design.
3. Personalise the results: Now we've changed the title. We could also do things
such as change the icons. And at the moment,
Copilot is creating these where we can't change
the colors directly, but we can change the
icons themselves. So I could right click,
change picture from icons, type in something such as Cost. Select something
like the pound sign. And if I want that
to be thicker, I can go to Shape Outline, choose the same color,
and adjust the weight. If you want to change the fonts, you can press Control A, go up to the font box and type
whichever font family you want. You can also change this photo or any photo that
AI has created. This has a colored
panel over it, which we can just hold down
shift and drag to the side, and then we can
right click on this. Choose change picture
from stock images. Type whatever you want, select
an image and click Insert. Then hold down
Shift and drag this back into position
until it snaps. So we've now changed our image
fonts and icons if needed. And lastly, we could add some animation to bring these
elements up one at a time. So if I click off the slide, lasso these elements here, control G to group, and now we have
that as one panel. We'll just quickly do that
to the other elements. Now we can click the first one, hold down Shift,
click the second. While shift is still held down, click the third and fourth. And now when we
go to animations, fade, start on click. These should all come
up on one click each. This is a good way to help align the audience
with your message.
4. Add a quote slide that matches style: We've created our first slide, we can easily add other
slides in the same style. So we can go to Copilot. And in this example,
I'm going to add a quote in the same
style as this slide. So I've written, create
another slide in the same color scheme
to add a strong quote. And Copilot may ask you some questions along the way
to help refine the slide. So in this example, it's asking you what kind of
quote would you like? I'm just going to
type in business, but you can put anything
you want in here and I want it after
the current slide. Copilot will provide you with some information along the way to tell you what it's doing. So now Copilot is letting
you know what it's done. And on slide two, we
go to our thumbnails, you'll see that it's
created this nice quote in the same font and
color scheme as the previous slide,
which looks really good. The text can be edited to
whatever you want it to be, and you can also change who
the quote is attributed to. You can even move these and
change the color as you wish. Copilot will also suggest things you can do
to refine this. If it's something as simple
as changing the text size, I would recommend you do this manually because it'll
probably be faster. So if I selected this and
then went up to text size, that's a lot quicker than
asking Copilot to do it.
5. Create visuals from your notes: Can also use copilot to create visual slides
from your notes. So if I just add
in a new slide and pay some notes here, I can say, create a visual slide to show cost reduction of
32% as in this text. Copilot will often ask questions to help
refine the process. So I'm going to
choose this option here for a before and
after comparison. And I want this to be after
the quote, slide three. So now Copilot has
added the slide, given you some detail
about what it's done, and given you a few options for how you can change
it if you want to. So that looks pretty good to me. But as before, all
of these elements are editable and you
can move them around. This is already in the center of the page, which is great. My preference is to not have this bit at the bottom,
which I can just delete. And I'd like to resize
these up very slightly, so I could group them with
Control G, size them up. You can adjust the
rounded corners, which have gone a
bit smaller as I've resized it by dragging the
yellow dot to the right. And now I'm going to
ungroup everything with Control Shift G,
hold down shift, move this down, hold
down Control and Shift, drag it from the corner,
and then make it bigger. And finally, I'd just
add some animation. Control G to group these
first, as we did before. I think this helps tell
the story of the slide. We'll go to animations, fade them on one at
a time on click, and we'll say before we
had 100% after we have 68, which is a 32% decrease. That's a really nice way of
helping tell this story.
6. Create data visualisations: The next slide, I'm
going to create a timeline of how these goals
are going to be achieved. Create a timeline slide with
ten parts to it 2025-2026. Copilot will prompt you for extra information that will help with the design
of the slide. I'm going to select
generic project phases, and that I want this to be at the end of the presentation. So now we have our timeline, and it's added it as slide four. That looks pretty good to me. Remember that these are all editable elements
that you can change, for example, I would resize these 2025 and 2026 panels,
so I'll click and drag. That would do for 2026,
and then I'll expand this. And I'd probably want all
of these circles to be the same color unless there was any specific reason why we
were highlighting them, so I can select them all by clicking and dragging
over them all, choosing shape fill and
picking the light color. Now, I might want to
reveal all of 2025 first, so I can click drag over those. Control G. Now I've
got all of 2025 there. I'll press Undo and 2026 there. So I can click the
first one, Shift click, the second one, animations
fade, start on click. And now we can reveal
2025 and 2026. As before, these are all
editable and you can make any changes as they're all individual
PowerPoint elements.
7. Summarize a deck into key points: Now going to add the next slide, which is going to be some key takeaways for this presentation. And on the light
green background, slide three is the color scheme that I'd like to
use for that slide. So I can type,
create a slide with three key takeaways on the light green background
used in Slide three. And Copilot is now asking, what should these focus on? And I'm going to choose
forward looking actions. Put it at the end and confirm. So Copilot has added
the key takeaway slide. It's also given some suggestions of how you could rewrite
any of the text. This looks pretty good to me. Where it's wrapped,
I'd rather it didn't, so I can click this and
extend it to the end. Other than that, I might want it to animate
one at a time. So again, I can select by clicking and dragging
over Control G to group Now in click one, hold down shift, and then
click two and three. Animations fade and
choose on click. And now we can look
at the key takeaways.
8. Creating charts from figures: Now we're going to
add a bar chart, and I'm going to
give it some figures so that it can create
the chart for us. So I'm going to say,
create a bar chart showing price fluctuations
throughout 2025 the cost per kilowatt
hours of energy, and I've provided it
with the 12 data points. Copilot has asked where the
chart should be placed, and I'm going to
choose new slide and I can move
this if I want to. I'm going to choose to
match the existing theme. When it's created it, we can change its
colors if we wish, because it will be an
editable native chart. Now it's created the
chart on slide six, and that looks pretty
good to start with. Copilot will ask you if
you want to add any of these things such as a trend line or highlighting
anything in particular. One thing I would do is I wouldn't actually use
this Y axis here, as all the data is clearly
written as data labels, so you can click on
that and delete it. And I'd also make
these data labels a little bigger so you
can click on them, press the font size up.
That looks pretty good. And you can change
the colors of all of these by going to shape fill and picking just one color
and then highlight any individual one
that you want to draw attention to by clicking on it, and then clicking
on it again and then changing the color
to whatever you want. For example, I can select
the darker color using this text if we want to draw attention to the October figure. You can also apply the
same to the data labels, so I can click on all of those. Color them this green
that we've used here, and then click on
this 1 second time and make that one
the dark green. So now that looks
good, and it matches our color scheme and
highlights the October figure.
9. Make slides more concise: I if we want to reduce
some of this text, we could make sure it's selected and tell Copilot to reduce this text to one
sentence as an example. So I think that looks better. Copilot has also suggested that it could do the
other two cards to match. I will say yes. Other
two cards to match. So now all the text is of a similar length,
which I think looks good. We can select this, make it
a bit bigger if we want. I'm going to make it 12, and then do the same here. And I think that looks good. As before, you can
always edit any of the text and change
it as you see fit.
10. Generate images that match the theme: I'd like to end this mini deck with a slide that
says any questions. So add a slide saying any
questions in big text on a darkened image
of a solar farm. Great. Now it's added
slide six, which says, Any questions over a big
image of a solar farm. This presentation looks good now. We can run it
from the start.
11. Re styling entire presentations: As always with Copilot, we can make changes
at the end if we want to the
entire presentation. So I think this
color palette looks good and is suitable for
this subject matter. But with any
presentation you create, you can always use Copilot to change it
throughout at the end. So if I said, change the color scheme across all
slides to pink and purple. I'm doing this just
to show you that it can be done and how
powerful it is. Copilot will now go and change the colors of everything
throughout the presentation, which will take a few minutes. A So now Copilot has changed the entire
color palette throughout, and it's also asking
if you want to adjust any shades or change any images to better
match the new palette. This isn't a color scheme I necessarily use for
this type of content, but it's good to know that
you can easily do this. And the shades it uses are
normally quite nice colors, and they work well together. We can also press Control Z to go back to the
previous color scheme.
12. Produce speaker notes: Now we have the basics
of our presentation. We can use Copilot to create some rough speaker notes that
we can edit into our style. So I can say create speaker
notes for each slide. So Copilot is now asking, what sort of detail would you
like for the speaker notes? I'm going to choose brief
summaries and just the content. You can select anything
that's relevant to you, and then of course, it
can be edited later. So now Copilot has added brief speaker notes
to all seven slides. You can reveal the
notes. This can really help give you a
starting point for the notes, especially if you
have a lot of slides. And, of course, you can
edit them however you want.
13. Summary: If you've enjoyed
this short lesson, please share a
project that you've created with the help of AI. I'd love to see them, and I give feedback to every single
one that's added. Please also leave a
very short review to let me know how you found it.
Alan Lomer, POWERPOINT DESIGNER AND TEACHER
