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This review first appeared in issue 355 of PC Pro.

If you want an example of what not to use Copilot for in PowerPoint, then I have just the thing.

You might think that asking Copilot Pro to “create a presentation about Copilot Pro in PowerPoint” would be an easy win for the AI. You would think wrong: instead, it came up with a presentation about a fictitious piece of software that appears to combine advanced aircraft flight planning with a collision avoidance system – which it illustrated with a picture of a car.

Of all the Office applications, PowerPoint probably benefits least from Copilot Pro when it comes to creating documents from scratch. This is down to it not having one of the key features that business users of Copilot get: the ability to take a Word document and turn it into a PowerPoint deck. PowerPoint is, fundamentally, an application for taking information and presenting it in a visual format, and a 2,000-character prompt just isn’t enough for anything except the shortest presentations.

**“Create a six-slide presentation about processors” resulted in this half-decent effort, even if Copilot’s choice of images is a little random (not unusually).** (Image credit: Future)

What Copilot is good for, though, is taking an existing deck and improving it. If you don’t like a visual being on the left-hand side of a slide, you can just ask Copilot to move it to the right – although you also need to tell it to move whatever is already on the right to the left, too, if you don’t want a visual pile-up to ensue. Similarly, asking it to change the headline font on all slides to, say, Constantia – and it makes the changes in seconds – feels magical.

Wisely, Microsoft includes a set of pre-made prompts to get you started with the kind of things that Copilot is good at. For example, it can scan a deck for deadlines and list them all out, helping you avoid that moment when you realize you have combined two people’s work and got entirely different deadlines for a project in them.

Overall, stick to the preset prompts at first, and Copilot Pro in PowerPoint is a useful tool.

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Ian has been writing about technology for more than 20 years, which is long enough for his original focus – Apple – to have gone from “five days from bankruptcy” to “biggest company in the world”. Since then he’s managed magazines, websites, apps, YouTube channels, Facebook pages and pretty much every other kind of medium there is. He’s interested in mobile technology, from laptops to phones via tablets and smartwatches, along with the cloud and startups.

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