Keep your presentation on-brand with Copilot
To help you create polished and on-brand presentations, Microsoft has developed a Copilot PowerPoint starter template optimized for use with Copilot. This template follows best practices and includes recommended layouts, ensuring that Copilot can generate high-quality slides that align with your organization's branding and content needs.
The starter template includes multiple text placeholder sizes for readability and visual appeal. It also has a range of layouts for various content types like text-only or slides that include images. Finally, the slides in the starter template are clearly named so that Copilot can understand the purpose of each and select the right one.
Adding Your Organization’s Design
Incorporating your organization's design elements into layouts ensures brand consistency. Customize the template by:
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Adding elements such as your logo, color schemes, and fonts to the Slide Master. These elements will then be inherited by all layouts beneath it, ensuring uniformity.
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Set up theme fonts and theme colors to align with brand guidelines. The theme fonts will automatically apply to the placeholders throughout the template. In Slide Master view, you can further format text and content placeholders using theme colors so that text or content added to your slides will automatically adopt those attributes.
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Incorporating decorative elements that are part of the organization's visual identity. This could include specific shapes, lines, watermarks, or background images that enhance the aesthetic appeal while staying consistent with the brand.
It's recommended to design around the placeholders and avoid placing design elements in the way of content placeholders to ensure legibility. Once you have the recommended set of layouts (as seen in the starter template), you can add new layouts and move the placeholders around to create more variety in Copilot output. For example, try moving an image placeholder to the opposite side to mirror layouts and increase the selection Copilot must choose from.
Use Slide Master to design your template
To access the Slide Master feature launch PowerPoint desktop, then go to the View tab in the ribbon and select Slide Master from the Master Views section.
Important: You can use a PowerPoint template to create a presentation on any platform, but you have to create the template in PowerPoint for Windows or PowerPoint for Mac.
There is a hierarchy of slides. The topmost slide is the Slide Master. Any elements or slide level definitions on the Slide Master will be inherited by the slides below it, known as layout masters
Layout naming
We recommend keeping the starter template layout names, as they are optimized for Copilot slide types. They'll be retained when you paste the layouts into your template. If changes are necessary, ensure the new names reflect the slide's purpose and follow these examples:
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Slide type |
Slide naming suggestions |
|---|---|
|
Title |
Title slide Cover Title |
|
Agenda |
Agenda Agenda slide |
|
Section |
Section Divider Transition Chapter |
|
Content |
Content Text |
|
Conclusion |
Conclusion Closing End slide Summary |
Note: Currently layout name matching is supported in English and Japanese.
Recommendation: Ensure each slide type has at least one corresponding layout named appropriately. Rename custom layouts to exclude specified keywords to prevent Copilot from selecting them while keeping them available for end-users.
Using your updated template with Copilot
Important: Make sure your template is saved as a .potx file.
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Open the template in PowerPoint
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Click the Copilot icon at the top left of the slide and choose Replace this presentation
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Create your presentation
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