Copilot has lived inside PowerPoint for a while, but with the latest updates and models it now produces decks that follow your branding and are close to ready to present. In our recent newsletter Copilot Became the Slide Master, we showed how to build a deck from your sources, add interactive slides and use the built-in skills.
This blog goes deeper on skills: what they are, which of Microsoft’s own skills we recommend trying first, and how to create, share and deploy your own.
Can you say goodbye to the hours spent grinding away in PowerPoint to make a decent deck? We’d like to say yes, and skills play a part.
Skills give Copilot a reusable set of instructions for a particular task. That could be reviewing a presentation, preparing you for the questions an audience may ask, or following your organisation’s preferred way of building a deck.
This means you do not have to write the perfect prompt from scratch every time. You can select a skill, tell Copilot what you need, and give it a much clearer process to follow.
Put simply, a skill is a saved set of instructions that tells Copilot how to carry out a particular type of task, step by step, every time you use it.
In short:
| Prompt | Skill |
|---|---|
| A request for this particular presentation | A reusable method for handling a type of task |
| Often needs to include all the context and rules | Keeps the workflow and instructions together |
| Useful for one-off changes | Useful for repeated or standardised work |
| Example: “Review this deck” | Example: a review skill with a defined review process |
Open Copilot, select the + in the chat box or you can @ tag in the chat. The screenshots below show each step. We’ll be using Project Nimbus as an example throughout.
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*To test these skills, we used the Project Nimbus deck: a short senior leadership kick-off designed to bring stakeholders up to speed, ask three key questions and secure their support.
A second pair of eyes that checks more than how your deck looks. Review this presentation assesses whether your deck is right for the audience and the occasion, then tells you what to fix first.
How it works: It starts by asking about your audience, delivery format and available time. It then reviews the entire presentation against that context.
What it found in Project Nimbus (a live senior management kick-off of under 30 minutes):
What it recommended: It ranked the improvements in order of priority, including adding dates, owners and deadlines, and making the decisions clearer.
The result: A deck that was clearer, more focused and better prepared for discussion.
Skill two: Prepare for Questions
Find the questions that could stop your approval before your audience asks them. Prepare for questions anticipates the objections your audience may raise and helps you prepare stronger answers.
How it works: It starts by asking about your audience, meeting goal and delivery format, then tailors its response to that context.
What it found in Project Nimbus: Five likely objections, including:
What it recommended: For each concern, it suggested how to acknowledge it, how to respond and what supporting evidence to provide.
The result: It showed where the presenter needed better answers and where the slides needed stronger evidence. That made the presentation more credible and left the presenter better prepared for questions from senior management.
Sharpen slide titles turns general topic headings into concise titles that communicate each slide's main takeaway.
How it works: It reviews your slide headings and rewrites them so each one states the key message, not just the topic.
What it did in Project Nimbus: It rewrote five titles, including:
The result: Readers can understand the presentation's story more quickly by scanning the titles, and each slide's key message is clearer for a senior audience.
Some rewritten titles focused on only one part of a slide, so they still needed a human check to make sure the right message was being emphasised.
There are three ways to create a skill in PowerPoint: write it yourself, upload a ZIP file or record yourself doing the task.
First, go to custom skills from the chat box by clicking the +
Go to Custom Skills and you should see the different ways to create a skill.
To create a skill manually, you’ll need to give it a name, a description and a set of instructions. If you already have a clear idea of what you want the skill to do, you can add these yourself. You could also describe your idea to Copilot and ask it to help you develop the instructions before you create the skill.
For example, you might create a skill that:
If you want a bit more detail in your skill, you can upload one as a ZIP file instead.
To do this, put your files into a ZIP file and upload it to Copilot.
The ZIP must include a SKILL.md file. This contains the skill’s name, description and the instructions Copilot should follow. You can then add supporting files that give Copilot more context about the required structure, style or output.
For our test, we included the SKILL.md file alongside a branded PowerPoint presentation. The instructions explained how the presentation should be created, while the example deck gave Copilot a clearer reference for the layouts and visual style we wanted. Using the skill, it was able to follow the Dovetail branding quite well.
For example, indie our ZIP file, it contained these two things:
You do not have to include a presentation. Depending on the purpose of the skill, useful supporting files could include:
Microsoft says PowerPoint skill ZIPs support file types including md, txt, csv, json, xml, html, svg, py and js. PNG images, PDFs and ZIP files placed inside another ZIP are not currently supported
File support and results may vary, so test the skill with your own template before sharing it more widely.
Tip: you can also get Copilot to help you come up with ideas for your skill and even create the ZIP file for you.
If writing the instructions feels like too much work, you can show Copilot what you want instead.
Start recording and work through a repeatable presentation task as you normally would. You can give Copilot prompts, edit the slides yourself or use the tools in the PowerPoint ribbon. Once you stop, Copilot turns what you did into a draft skill that you can check and refine before saving.
This could work well for tasks such as cleaning up tables, restyling charts, changing layouts or placing logos consistently. Keep the recording focused on one outcome rather than trying to capture every part of your presentation process at once.
The easiest way to find where your skill lives is to go back to Custom skills and click “Skills OneDrive folder”. This takes you to the folder in OneDrive where your skills are saved, and from there you can share them with your team or individually. Skills you create are personal by default, so if you want to roll one out across the whole organisation, see the section below.
Organisation-wide deployment
Microsoft 365 administrators can package and deploy skills to everyone or selected users and groups through the Microsoft 365 admin centre. That deployment package requires the skill files, an app manifest and icons.
To deploy a skill: In the Microsoft 365 admin centre, go to Agents → All agents → Add agent, upload the skill as a ZIP and check the validation results. Then choose all users or specific users and groups, and finish publishing. You can confirm it worked under Agents → Tools.
Further detail from Microsoft:
Skills can make Copilot more consistent, but they will not guarantee a perfect presentation every time. Availability and the skills you see may also vary depending on your Copilot licence, version of PowerPoint and your organisation’s settings.
Test your skill across a few different presentations before relying on it more widely. Check the facts, figures and any claims Copilot adds, and make the instructions clear enough to produce consistent results without forcing every presentation into exactly the same structure.
For branded presentations, we've found three approaches that work for us: pointing Copilot at your branded template, using a skill, or using a brand kit created in Copilot. We'll go through these in another blog.
PowerPoint is getting much closer to creating the presentation you actually had in mind, rather than just giving you a rough first draft.
Start by experimenting with the skills Microsoft has already provided. They can help you review a deck, prepare for difficult questions and make the story easier to follow. If you have a more specific or repeatable way of working, you can create your own skill and give Copilot clearer instructions to follow.
This feels like a big step forward for Copilot in Microsoft 365. Better models and more useful features are making it less about generating something quickly and more about helping you produce work that is genuinely ready to use.
If you have any more questions about Copilot in PowerPoint or for everything Copilot and Microsoft 365 contact us using the form below.
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Citations:
Microsoft (n.d.) Deploy organization skills for Copilot in PowerPoint. Microsoft Support. Available at: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint/copilot/deploy-organization-skills-for-copilot-in-powerpoint