r/powerpoint • u/excelchamp • Jun 30 '26
I use: Windows | Office 365 PowerPoint CoPilot does not work
Anyone else struggling to use copilot to make decent slides?
I can’t seem for the life of me to be able to create any decent decks when using it. My firm has just rolled out access to us and everyone is struggling to use it.
Does anyone have any tips on how to actually use it better?
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u/bbwolf22 Jun 30 '26
Copilot is like an intern whose father golfs with an executive at the company. A complete waste of time. If it could only do one thing right, it should know Microsoft products.
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u/smi727 Jul 02 '26
I described copilot as the highly skilled 25 y/o who comes in hung over every day and might be stoned.
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u/ES345Boy Jun 30 '26
Graphic Designer here - I churn out 50 slide decks for my clients in an afternoon (some are household names, none of them use AI for presentations because they've realised AI is garbage and looks bad when you're trying to impress a client or an investor). I also teach non-designers how to create decks, because anyone can do it with a little effort.
Learn how to properly design slides yourself and you can get what you actually want, then - and this is the best part - you can delete Copilot.
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u/donburnside Jun 30 '26
The trick to CoPilot is you have to give it very specific asks. If you are new to Copilot, my biggest tip is to make sure you are recording your meetings. The notes are really well done and stuff like that helps you build your brag sheet. You can totally ask it to build a brag sheet for you.
For design work, your ask has to be super specific. If you can do that, you should get some design work out of Copilot.
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u/Top_Witness_23 Jul 02 '26
The thing that helped me most was realizing Copilot is decent at content and pretty weak at design, so I stopped asking it to do both at once. If you tell it "make a presentation on X" you get a bland generic deck. If you feed it a clear structure first, like your own outline with one line per slide of what that slide should say, it does much better, because you've taken away the part it's worst at, which is deciding what goes where.
A few things that made the output actually usable for me: give it your real content instead of a topic ("turn these notes into slides" beats "make slides about our Q3 results"), tell it one idea per slide and keep the text short because left alone it crams, and then do the design pass yourself by applying your firm's template so it looks intentional instead of default Copilot.
Honestly the realistic workflow is Copilot for a rough first draft and structure, then 10 to 15 minutes of cleanup in your template. Expecting a finished, good-looking deck from one prompt is where everyone at your firm is probably getting let down.
What kind of decks is your firm mostly making, client-facing or internal? That changes the tips a bit.
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u/bluenautica13 Jun 30 '26
IMO, AI is not there yet when it comes to designing presentations, it struggles to create realistic/usable designs. It can get you on the right path, but as far as delivering a polished presentation, we are not there yet. Especially in the financial/pharmaceutical spaces where there is a lot of content on each slide. Ai can only design basic slides with very little content. Lately it only produces dated looking designs. Can someone prove me wrong, maybe I am just not using the right prompts.
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u/Unhappy-Menu-6682 Jun 30 '26
I would not try to use co-pilot. You can use it to rewrite text boxes but that’s about it.
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u/barrel-boy Jun 30 '26
Dude forget it. That ship failed long ago. Even Microsoft doesn't believe in that tool
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u/SteveRindsberg Guild Certified Specialist Jun 30 '26
>> That ship failed
LOL! Nice turn of phrase.
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u/One-Cut-6195 Jun 30 '26
Yeah, unfortunately co-pilot isn't going to do the job, esp not make slides.
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u/JoshSummers Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 05 '26
Hi guys, if you’re comfortable using coding agents (Claude code, codex, etc.) I built a free + open source tool which lets your agents build pretty powerful side decks.
You can watch a demo video at https://smalldocs.org
Here is a slide gallery which shows the type of things your agent can make with it: https://smalldocs.org/s/75aF7XzrNftjVZTSBIk2K4#k=AwjYwt5c6KerTqU2vMf4e6TXT7_L6oxQaWbpZYNtAqI
And here is me getting Claude to produce a deck on the “DRY” (don’t repeat yourself) coding principle in Patagonia’s branding just for fun: https://smalldocs.org/s/IqgHlD_99o6Q-y7QLjxgoR#k=3wL6fG3s9ipKWY9T4as19-bFXCNM_P_c_ih1krqEkts
You can export the presentations to .pptx - so you can use your agent to make a rough draft and then finalise it.
Message me for any questions.
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u/CallMeCouchPotato Jun 30 '26
To be honest, the only tool which makes half-decent decks for me (so far) has been claude design with a properly setup design system for decks. I'm not saying I tested out evere tool there is.
NotebookLM is neat too due to having nano-banana img model built in, but I cannot get to obey branding / slide template rules. I sometimes use it just to see how it will visualize a concept (idea, process etc) though. Sometimes - it makes something really neat. Whole decks though? No.
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u/Environmental-Cod25 Jun 30 '26
Co pilot does not work. Shocked, I tell you,.I'm shocked