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

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Since the latest updates, Copilot in PowerPoint does more than suggest a first slide: you choose the language model behind it, let Copilot draw on your Brand Kit, build yourself reusable “skills,” and control image generation right down to the aspect ratio. Five tricks for exactly where to find each one in the interface.

1. Choosing 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 Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6, among others, 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, that means Auto is the right choice for most slides. But once you’re dealing with more complex slide dramaturgy — lots of data points, a longer chain of argument, a sensitive client deck — it’s worth deliberately switching to a more capable model instead of re-prompting ten times. If you want to know what the Anthropic connection actually means for governance and EU tenants, we’ve broken that down separately: Anthropic in Microsoft 365: Panic or pragmatic governance?

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   "Auto" automatically picks the right model for the task — for most slides, that's all you need.

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   Claude Opus 5 is active here (checkmark) — good for more complex slide dramaturgy.

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   Under "Image generation" sits the separate selector for the image model, see trick 5.

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

Copilot can build presentations straight from your organization’s official Brand Kit instead of producing generic stock visuals. The path there runs through the + icon in the prompt field → Select brand → choose the Brand Kit you want. From then on, Copilot pulls colors, logos, and approved images from exactly that source.

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   Published Brand Kits show up here as tiles — the names and how many there are depend on your tenant.

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   Under "Manage kits," admins control which kits are available to choose from at all.

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 Microsoft 365 Copilot admin area — including an Enterprise Brand Manager policy. For genuinely accurate image selection, Microsoft recommends an image set of several hundred to a thousand assets with clean metadata (name, description, tags).
• The feature is tied to a Microsoft 365 Copilot Premium license and is rolling out gradually — in some tenants, the Brand Kit selection dialog doesn’t yet show up everywhere in the Copilot app, even though the kit has already been published.

Beyond creation, you’ll also find a dedicated Brand tab in the PowerPoint ribbon: it lets you insert logos, images, and icons from the same Brand Kit into individual slides after the fact, without going through the Copilot chat at all.

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   The dedicated "Brand" tab in the ribbon — reachable independently of the Copilot chat.

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   The active Brand Kit is shown at the top of the panel; you can switch between several kits here.

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   "Insert objects" lets you browse logos, images, and icons straight from the kit.

3. Building 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).

It gets more interesting once you build your own skills: under Manage skills → Custom skills → Create OneDrive folder, Copilot creates a folder in your OneDrive. Inside it, every skill gets its own subfolder with a SKILL.md file — frontmatter with a name and description, followed by the actual instructions as plain text. One example from the official Microsoft 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 directly with @skillname in the prompt. One thing that matters in practice: the upload format currently doesn’t support images, PDFs, or nested ZIP folders — only text formats like .md, .txt, .csv, .json, or .html.

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   Pre-installed skills like "Visualize this slide" or "Explain this presentation" are available right away.

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   Under "Manage skills," you create your own skills or turn individual ones off.

4. Controlling image type and aspect ratio through the Designer

Next to the prompt field sits a small palette icon. It opens the Designer options for image generation: you decide whether Copilot should produce an Image, an Icon, or a Background, and set the aspect ratio directly — 3:2 landscape, 2:3 portrait, or 1:1 square. That saves you the detour of manually cropping a generated image afterward when, say, it needs to sit as a widescreen title background.

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   Image, Icon, or Background — "Image" is selected here.

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   Set the aspect ratio directly: 3:2 landscape, 2:3 portrait, or 1:1 square.

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

Just like with the text model, there’s a separate model selector for images too — currently including MAI Image (Microsoft’s own image model) and GPT-Image from OpenAI, joined, according to Microsoft’s release notes, by Black Forest Labs’ FLUX.2 Flex as a further option. The models differ noticeably in how cleanly they render text inside an image and in how photorealistic versus illustrative the result turns out. If a generated image keeps producing garbled text or a visual style that doesn’t fit, the fastest fix is often not a longer prompt, but simply the other model.

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   "Image generation" is expanded, showing the image models separately from the text models.

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   MAI Image 2.5 Flash is Microsoft's own image model.

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   GPT-Image from OpenAI often renders text in images more cleanly — just switch if you need to.

What you need for this

Model choice, Brand Kit, and skills all depend on Microsoft 365 Copilot — the Brand Kit feature additionally requires 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 one-on-one coaching. If it’s about a company-wide Brand Kit or an organization-wide skill library, that’s a job for Coaching for IT and Admins.

Sources: Microsoft Learn (release-notes, cowork-models, connect-to-ai-subprocessor, enable-enterprise-brand-images-powerpoint-copilot), Microsoft Support (copilot-in-powerpoint-skills, keep-your-presentation-on-brand-with-copilot), agentskills.io Specification