Copilot in PowerPoint: 5 Tricks for Better, On-Brand Slides

With its latest updates, Copilot in PowerPoint does more than suggest a first slide: you pick the language model behind it, have it work from your Brand Kit, build your own reusable “skills,” and control image generation right down to the aspect ratio. Here are five tricks, and exactly where to find each one.

1. Pick the language model yourself instead of leaving it to Copilot

At the top of the Copilot pane sits an unassuming dropdown that defaults to Auto. Open it, and under “General use” you’ll find several language models to choose from, currently including Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6, plus a separate section for image models. Microsoft officially enabled Anthropic’s Claude in Copilot Chat in June 2026, with the promise that users can pick whichever model fits the task.

In practice, Auto is the right choice for most slides. But once the storyline gets more complex (lots of data points, a longer line of argument, a sensitive client deck), it pays to switch to a more capable model on purpose instead of re-prompting ten times. If you want to know what the Anthropic connection actually means for governance and EU tenants, I’ve covered that separately: Anthropic in Microsoft 365: Panic or Pragmatic Governance?

2. The Brand Kit: your own colors, logos, and images instead of random slides

Copilot can build presentations straight from your organization’s official Brand Kit instead of reaching for generic stock visuals. To get there, click the + icon in the prompt field → Select brand → pick the Brand Kit you want, as Microsoft Support describes it. From then on, Copilot pulls colors, logos, and approved images from exactly that source.

Two things need to be in place before this works day to day:

• An admin has to create and publish the Brand Kit in the Copilot section of the Microsoft 365 admin center, including an Enterprise Brand Manager policy. For really accurate image selection, Microsoft recommends an image library of ideally more than a thousand assets with clean metadata (name, description, tags).
• The feature requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot Premium license and is rolling out gradually. In some tenants, the Brand Kit dialog doesn’t show up everywhere in the Copilot app yet, even though the kit has already been published.

Beyond creating decks, there’s also a dedicated Brand tab in the PowerPoint ribbon. It lets you add logos, images, and icons from the same Brand Kit to individual slides later on, without going through the Copilot chat at all.

3. Build your own skills instead of typing the same prompt ten times

In the Copilot pane, the + menu has a Choose skills entry. Pre-installed skills include “Visualize this slide” (turns text-heavy slides into graphics), “Review this presentation” (checks your storytelling), “Prepare for questions” (anticipates questions your audience might ask), and “Explain this presentation” (a neutral summary of the deck).

Things get more interesting when you build your own skills. Under Manage skills → Custom skills → Create OneDrive folder, Copilot creates a folder in your OneDrive. Inside it, each skill gets its own subfolder with a SKILL.md file: frontmatter with a name and description, followed by the actual instructions in plain text. Here’s an example from Microsoft’s official documentation:

---
name: create-executive-summary-slide
description: Use when I ask Copilot to create executive summary slide of a given deck.
---
## Create Executive Summary
Create the summary as requested, analyze the design style of the existing
deck, then add the summary as a new slide that follows that style.

Once it’s set up, you call the skill from the dropdown or type @skillname right in the prompt. One thing to know in practice: according to Microsoft Support, uploads currently don’t support images, PDFs, or nested ZIP folders, only text formats like .md, .txt, .csv, .json, or .html.

4. Control image type and aspect ratio in Designer

Next to the prompt field is a small palette icon. It opens the Designer options for image generation: you decide whether Copilot should create an Image, an Icon, or a Background, and you set the aspect ratio up front: 3:2 landscape, 2:3 portrait, or 1:1 square. That saves you from cropping a generated image by hand afterward, for example when it needs to work as a widescreen title background.

5. Switch the image model when a result doesn’t fit

Just like for text, there’s a separate model selector for images. It currently includes MAI Image (Microsoft’s own image model) and GPT-Image from OpenAI, and according to Microsoft’s release notes, Black Forest Labs’ FLUX.2 Flex is joining them as another option. The models differ noticeably in how cleanly they render text inside an image and in how photorealistic or illustrated the result looks. If your images keep coming out with garbled text or a style that doesn’t fit, the quickest fix often isn’t a longer prompt. It’s simply the other model.

What you need for this

Model choice, Brand Kit, and skills all require Microsoft 365 Copilot. The Brand Kit also needs the Premium tier and an admin who has already published the kit. If you want to try these five tricks on your own presentation, the fastest way to practice is in 1:1 coaching. If you’re after a company-wide Brand Kit or a skill library for the whole organization, that’s a job for coaching for IT teams and admins.

Sources: Microsoft Learn: Microsoft 365 Copilot release notes, Choose a model for Copilot Cowork, Anthropic models in Microsoft Online Services, How to Enable Enterprise Brand Images with PowerPoint Copilot; Microsoft Support: Use custom skills with Copilot in PowerPoint, Keep your presentation on-brand with Copilot; Agent Skills Specification