PowerPoint Like a Pro- Hidden Features, Corporate Templates & Copilot with Fiona Walsh [MVP]

Welcome back to another episode of the MC65FM podcast, the podcast where we explore Microsoft technologies with MDPs, Microsoft engineers, community leaders and industry experts. Today we're diving into one of the most underestimated applications in Microsoft 65. Almost everyone uses powerpoint yet very few people actually know how to use it well. Business has been thousands of hours every year creating presentations for sales, executive meetings, training sessions, conferences, customer proposal and international internal communication. But what separates an average side deck from that actually can convince people and how is Microsoft co-pilot changing the way we build presentations actually. We answer those questions, I'm joining my Microsoft powerpoint MBV Fiona Welch. Fiona has over 20 years of experience in helping organizations across Europe, the US, creating better presentations. She's the founder of Empower presentations, a Microsoft certified master trainer, certified presentation expert, former director of education at the presentation guild and one of the world's leading powerpoint educators. Fiona, welcome to the MC65FM podcast. Thank you. Thanks very much for having me on. Yeah, for all listeners who may not know you yet, tell us a little bit about your story, especially how did you came to powerpoint. Okay, yeah, I'll go back to the beginning. I studied chemistry at university and my first few roles would have been in corporate working for various different sectors from oil and gas to automotive and then I had a role in cosmetics industries, which is highly regulated, so regulated like pharmaceuticals, industries. And when I was in that role, I was working in R&D organization, so developing cosmetic products. And while I was in that role, I was asked to go on a project to implement a new ERP system. So for any of your audience that don't know what an ERP system is, it's enterprise planning and resource. So that was to manage all of the recipes and to manage all of the stock control for the raw materials we were using to develop products. So quite a big system. And as part of that project, I was given a one day trainer training course and then told you go and train everybody. So I started training people and just thought, I don't know if this isn't very good or this could be better. So I taught myself off and did a IT teacher training course in the evenings. So I studied for a year, doing two evenings a week and my tutor. So that's the the certification that's recognized by Microsoft as an IT teaching publication. And my tutor also did the Microsoft office exams. So then I did those Microsoft office specialist exams and then I was teaching Microsoft applications, office applications internally. And I think I just became the sort of PowerPoint person within that organization. And the company, yeah, these things sort of just happened. The company would, because it was in R&D center, they would have had chemists and scientists going to present things at conferences around Europe. And we would do, there's a big organization, big company. So we had brand guidelines. We had a good template, but people didn't really know how to use it and they didn't really understand how slides would come across to people. And so my manager would say to me, if you own that so and so it's going to present at this conference, I don't know, wherever. And they have these slides and they just not, you know, they're really not very good and I asked them to come to you and you get you to have a look at them. Would you, would you help them out? So I think that's kind of how it started really. And it was just things like, you know, people, all right, what I find of PowerPoint is that people don't tend to realize that one deck doesn't suit all different applications. And that's why PowerPoint gets the bad name. Okay, so we've all heard deaf PowerPoint. It's not PowerPoint. That's the problem. It's the way it's been used. For like, you know, you could have a PowerPoint presentation that's a handout like a PDF that's going to be sent to somebody that's never ever going to be presented. No one's going to stand up in front of an audience and present it. And then the mistake is that they think that same presentation can be given to people live and it doesn't work. So that's the biggest issue. And I suppose that's what I was helping people out with just getting an understanding of that concept and looking at their slides and saying, well, how big is this, you know, how big is handy people at this conference? So do you think they're going to be able to read that information on the slide? You've got this lobby chart and this graph here, but that's a takeaway. That's a handout slide. It's not a slide to be presented. So that's kind of where it all started. Yeah, yeah. Many people see PowerPoint as, yeah, just slides. Sorry for those. I've also not the experience. So what do professionals misunderstand about PowerPoint? I think people misunderstand its capabilities. There's a lot of things there that people aren't aware of, you know, like tools and functionality that they're just not aware of. I would often train people that have been using PowerPoint for years and they come away and say, well, I've had nothing planning before, but I still didn't get that that existed. And I'm saying to people, this isn't a new feature. This feature's been around probably since we went to, you know, there's a big change where we went to the Office 2028. That's a long of a lot of this. So 18 years ago. And I'm like, this is not new features. It's been around since then. And then I, how did I miss that? How did I not know that existed? So I think that's the biggest problem. People who are using PowerPoint, they've been using it for years. They either have had formal training, but maybe they haven't remembered or you know what I mean? Or it didn't land well with them. Or they've never had formal training. They're self-taught. And they're missing out on all these features to make them do their job easier and quicker. I think that's probably one of the biggest issues. And what did you think, what's skilled separate someone who was simply now's PowerPoint from someone who truly mastered presentation and communication? I think it's probably somebody that has maybe the time to have a poke around and look at all the different menus because things are right in front to people and they've never kicked on it and they don't know it exists because they're any sort of, they don't know what they don't know. And I think that's the difference. So it's whether you've been trained well. And I think the training comes with, you know, good training comes with context. You're going through training and saying, oh, you can add a hyperlink to a presentation. Somebody says, oh, okay, you can't think of a hyperlink that I'd want to out. And then they forget it. Whereas if you said you can add a hyperlink to a presentation and the way that could be used could be for appendices. You've got this really big table with all this information on that you might not need, you don't need anyone to see, but if someone asks you, you could put a hyperlink to the last slide, which is the appendix, then put a hyperlink back again to the slides you run already. Then I think the context gets people thinking and they're like, ah, so now I think how I could use hyperlinks in the presentation rather than you can add a hyperlink. I think it's the context that I'm coming up with business scenarios that people can relate to. I think that's the important bit. And you trained, I don't know, how does a lot of business do with those? What pattern do you see in the over and over again? I think it's really the not known what they don't know. And quite often when I'm starting a training session, I always ask people what they're looking to get from the training session. So I'll go around the room and say, what do you want to get from today? Sometimes somebody will come up with something that I haven't planned on covering, because then I make sure it's covered, which obviously is good. But quite a few people would say, oh, I'm in advanced, I'm in advanced use, and maybe they'd been asked to go on the training. They might not really want to go on the training. And then I find what I call fundamentals, I won't call them basics, but I call them fundamentals. And then it again, so the people aren't familiar with these fundamentals, but I got help and do their job quicker. Yeah, I think over the years, Powerpoint has received a dozen of updates, which features deserve far more attention from your side. Okay, well, maybe I'll start talking about the fundamentals, because those are the bits that people aren't familiar with. So we'll start on those and then there's some new features that we can talk about as well. So the fundamentals that I really focus on would be things like the alignment tools. Those are tools that will allow you to very quickly align content on slide. You can do it manually, because Microsoft will have alignment guides, so you'll get red dotted lines. If you select an object and you're trying to move it around, you'll see lines. And if you've only got a couple of objects on a page, it's absolutely fine. Do it manually. You don't have to use the tools. So you can align things very, very quickly using these guides. The problem is the more content you have on a slide, perhaps doesn't know what you're trying to align with what. So if you've got lots of content on you've got text boxes, you've got icons, you've got images, you know, all this content on the slide building with a big picture, then you can't use those manual alignment guides because they'll be guiding you to the wrong alignment. And this is where those tools come in. So you'll find them on the home tab and they're under, and I'm so used to just doing this, I need to have a quick look. They're under the arrange drop-down menu. Okay, and under that arrange drop-down menu, you have got position objects down the bottom and you've got a line. You can align either in a horizontal plane or in a vertical plane. You need to get that one right because if you choose the wrong one, they'll all stack on top of each other. Okay, so people sort of, you know, sometimes get that the one way round, but that's okay. You can do undo, controls Z, well undo your last action anyway, so that's fine. And that allows you to align top middle or bottom and then left, then to unwrite. And the reason why you've got the different ones there is let's say if you were aligning a text box, you'd want to align those to the top because, you know, you want the text to start at the top, whereas if you had in a different type of content, you might go align to the bottom, you know, if it's at the bottom of the page, pictures, you might want to align them to the bottom. So, you know, you've got different options there. You also have the option to distribute content, so that's put the same gap in between each bit of point that you have as well. So that's also a very handy one. And under that same menu, you've got the selection pane and the majority of people that I teach have never heard of the selection pane. Certainly don't know what it does, why, why you would use it. And that's a knockup really, really key feature. So the selection pane basically shows you an overview of what you've got on a slide. So for me, I would open a selection pane, I'll have a selection pane at most the time anyway, but from a corporate perspective, let's say we work in another presentation that we haven't created. If it's a slide that I haven't created, the first thing I'd want to do is click on the selection pane because then I can see how the slide's been put together. It will show when content is grouped. So grouping is another one of the fundamentals. If we have a couple of different objects, we can group them so that they are together, we can move them around together, we can resize them together. That kind of makes it easier for us to work with. And the selection pane will show what content is on the slide, how it's been put together, how it's been grouped, but also, I mean, the reason it's there, hence the main selection pane is if we can't click on something, so it's not as in PowerPoint because our content is all in a layer on the slide. Excuse me, a content in the layer layers on the slide. Yeah, content, yeah, and sometimes the content isn't over on top of each other and sometimes it is on top of each other. But we also have some objects that might have almost like visible space around them, but it obscures what's on the layer below. So it means that we actually can't click on the object we want to. So we can see it, but we can't physically click on it. And that's what the selection pane is for. So it will allow us to select it from that pane if we can't click on it. Okay, so in particular, where we have words and we've maybe put words in an arc going around and set a circle or something, that has a big white space underneath or a big space underneath that text box that obscures what's underneath. So that's the type, I'm talking about, and the selection pane will basically just give us an idea of, you know, what content we've got there and allow us to select it. Have another example of selection pane. I had a map of Ireland and it had the counties on it. So this was working with a client and it had Mac with 26 counties on. And the counties weren't named. Okay. Now that's one when you can see the shape of something, but in PowerPoint, it's just a box. Even if there's any regular shape like the shape of a country or the county, when we look at it, when we click on it, it just has a box around. If the counties were all the same color, we wanted to highlight one. We're clicking on where we think that is, but it's just a box. It's not actually shown the shape of the county that we would recognize or the country we would recognize. So what's the example where we would need to or we would probably want to rename all of the counties, countries, if it was a, you know, European maps, a, just to make it easy for our audience. Because it's quite too, let's say, I know you're in Germany, it's really easy to pick out that, because we know it's on the coast and we know what it looks like the edge of the map. So we'd be able to pick that. But if we were maybe looking at a country in the center of Europe, it might be a bit more important to actually say, well, I know it's around there, but when we click on it, it's got as it's a square, it's a big, but that's the snile or where I would rename everything in the selection pattern that the audience of somebody, person could look at the selection pattern and then just click and they can choose the country, county, whatever it is they want to. Yeah, I think is there options to automate these things and what automations features are really cool because I think most start, not with the blanks, blank presentation, most they have, I don't know, master slides and then they start to fill it all per hand and yeah, is there any automation things that's helps the users? You can do slide from an outline word, that's a feature that's been around for again many, many years. If you set up styles and everything like that properly, in word, you can do slide from an outline. Yeah, you're right, you need to have a slide master set up properly to start with. One of the biggest issues that I find is that my clients are often not working with a very robust template and one of the issues there is that PowerPoint templates are, like, working with PowerPoint templates is a real art and what I find is that often they're not really quick to get a very smart link. Unfortunately, I see some absolutely fantastic ones and I see some that I'm like, "Oh, can't go on the other day, I didn't even have a color palette in it, it was just by on the surface, it wasn't actually in the slide master." So that's having a good slide template that's been put to be properly is going to be really, really helpful. From a copilot perspective, and that's obviously where our automation is coming in there really, we want to have good selection of layouts. So lots of layouts that copilot can use. So rather than, like, when we, if we were to just start a blank presentation, we get nine different layouts that we would have as the standard, might be 10, something like that. We want a lot more, a lot more picture options as well so that copilot can can use those. So I find where the slide masters are limited in the number of layouts and the type and style of layouts they've got, it will limit copilot as well, unfortunately, because copilot then only kind of pick up so much from that particular template. We've also got designer and designer is working from those slide layouts as well. And some corporate templates that I'm working with, I go to use designer and it just will not work at all. Other templates, it works with extremely well. So again, that's very much dependent on how good the template is. And it's frustrating because not everybody has, you know, that not everybody can necessarily change their slides template either. So that's, unfortunately, one of the, one of the issues that comes up that I have to see, you know, do they have any, is there any way they can feedback to the department who got the template, you can create the template or the external company that created the templates, any feedback that we can give to people? And a lot of the time there isn't and they're really stuck with what they've got. And it's just a case of how can they best work with it? Which can be frustrating. But unfortunately, that's the nature of the beast as it were. Yeah, yeah. Where I often have, or yeah, I longer used a stop using power for a while, but if it's, yeah, for years, there kind of smiled out. And it looks, it's never matched really the, the layout from my, my slide, from my slides. It looks colorful. And is there any option to prove to this mark out for, yeah, and to get better look? And what I think, what is more, more custom designs? So the smart arts have been around. I think they've been around since 2008 as well. So they're getting on a bit. And I think one of the, one of the worst things I see with smart arts is where people put them into 3D mode. Yeah, I'm thinking. Just leaving the default so that it gives you, don't go with bevels, don't go with 3D options, just leave the default that you have. That will look cleaner. We actually have some new smart arts that have just been introduced in the last couple of months. So they were in general availability in July, actually, so last month. And we have some quite nice options. So we have three new smart arts available to us. One of them is timeline, which is quite nice. So you've got in a different options. It's not giving you a timeline. So you can, you can add the dates and everything yourself on the topics. And it's just going to put it in a linear flow. It's not giving you, like, let's say, if we've got three months compared to one month, it's not giving that size, perspective. It's just giving you date one, day two, day three. So no sort of gaps in between. But that's quite nice for a project, something like that, nice and clean as well. So not so much the big blocks of colour, very clean looking. We also have a meet the team. So meet the team will allow us to put in pictures. So we've got a picture of the team member. We've got the name and we've got the job title. And there's a few different options there as well, which is quite nice. And it will reorder everything for you the more people that you need to add to that. We've also got something called text cards, which will, yeah, it's various different layouts. So some of them watch this straight line in between, but it just looks a bit more modern because some of those ones that you're saying they've been around for a long time and they're sort of looking, you know, they're looking a bit dated now. So those are a welcome addition, I think, to the traditional smart arts, those three. So timeline meet the team and the text cards. One thing I want to mention, or two things actually, I want to mention a smart art, if you have bulleted text in a, let's say, standard title and content placeholder or layout and then you have bulleted text in the placeholder, if you select the place or select the text to do that, you click on the outside of the text box to change your dotted line into a solid line, then all the text within that slot, we don't have to manually scroll over, it's going to be mouse and select it. So click on the outside text box to start with that would select all the text, then we have a convert to smart art button on the home tab, which is like a little green Chevron type button, right in the center of the home tab, and that will allow you to convert it straight to a smart art. So that quickly allows you to have a nicer looking slide. The text cards are quite nice for that conversion, actually, they can give you a really nice sort of layout, nice and clean with these sort of lines and minimalistic look almost rather than the traditional ones. And then if you're working with a smart art and you can't quite get it to do what you want it to do, we also have a convert to group shapes or the shapes. So if we've taken our text to start within convert it to a smart art, we can convert it back to text again if it's not working, we don't have to undo, we can convert back to text. So even if we come in, so the undo will work while you've got loved, while you loved onto your computer. If you come back say a week later and you don't like what you've got on the slide, the smart art normally the undo isn't going to work now because it's a week later, but we can still convert it back to text. So that feature will work at any time. We also have the option to convert it to shapes and we've ended up with a group of shapes. So that'll allow us to finish off that smart art because that we might not be able to do exactly what we want to with it and then we've got shapes that we can on group and we can move things to where they need to be. That is what I would tell people who are doing organization charts. So we have the hierarchy, smart art and PowerPoint and quite often there might be like a dotted line into say another department or something that somebody would have within a team and that's very difficult to do in smart art, but if you converted to shapes, it allows you to then copy a shape or duplicate a shape, press and control D, move it in that shape somewhere else and then have an adopted line, but you can't do that in when it's a smart art, but you can do it if you converted to shapes. So I think those two things are really really key. The other thing if we do use that convert to shapes to finish off, I always always recommend that people keep the original smart art and take a duplicate of that slide. So if you click on the slide thumbnail, control D, that will duplicate the slide for you. Keep the original one in case you need to go back to that because otherwise then you're always editing shapes. You know, so it would be easier to edit the original and then do the extra bits than it would start not starting scratch, but you know, then having to add more roles. So that's what I would recommend people do, and maybe having that as a different file or having that saved at the end so that you can always go back to it, that original smart art. And you say, when you do this, yeah, a shortcut, is there, I don't know, everyone knows the copy-paste shortcut, but is there shortcut, you say they do these are really awesome, every professional shoulder memorized? I think the control D, the duplicate function is definitely one. So that will duplicate if you've got the content selected on the slide, it will duplicate that on the slide. So rather than you putting in several shapes, you just put one in, format it, then just duplicate them. It will, if you do control D to duplicate an object, move it to the location you want it to be on the slide, then do control D again, it'll actually put a series of shapes, text boxes, whatever that is in. You've also got that on the slide, thumbnail level to duplicate the slides, that's a really important one. Control G will group content for you as well, so that's a quick one for the grouping. I do use some sort of T-keyboard shortcuts, I'm not a big keyboard shortcut person, but I do use the quick access toolbar, and that's another feature that I think people aren't familiar with. So the quick access toolbar is available in PowerPoint Word, Excel, and classic outlook, it's not available in new outlook, and that will allow you to put icons or features commands that you would use frequently. So when I'm planning, I get people to put the alignment tools on there, and the selection pane on there, because they're not hidden, they're writing front of them to look at. So those are the type of themes I would get people putting on quick access toolbar in PowerPoint anyway. I think that's really, really valuable. Actually, one that I did have, or have got on my quick access toolbar, is to add a text box. So because that's kind of, you have to go to Insert, and then you go over here, but we have a new feature, which is in the beta version of PowerPoint at the moment, so hopefully that will be out in September. So now, if you double-click anywhere on a slide, you will get a text box. So that will be called, if you don't have that now, it will be coming very, very soon. So double-click, then your cursor will flash, and you've got a text box. You need to start typing, because if you go to StartType, you can make a way that text box disappears. But double-click anywhere, start typing, start typing, and you have created a text box. That's hard off the press. I think we'll be getting that. Usually the second choose, they have the month that those features tend to, those new features tend to quite. So I think that will be, yeah, probably set 10 right in look at that. I think another topic, especially the companies that pay a lot, the corporate templates, I see so many companies, and sometimes I ask, "Oh, what was the price?" And they say, "Okay, it's a good one, it's damn expensive." But why are these templates so important? "Oh, that's your foundation, that's your starting point." So, you know, if you, from a corporate perspective, I mean, I'm not, I might be helping people doing slides for conferences, but you know, I'm not a, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, that's individuals who are going to speak at a conference. You know, doing business people are going to speak at a conference, I'm not talking about helping people through slides that are running conferences. That's not what I'm talking about. But it's just having that consistency, it's having some branding, okay, it's standing, what colors you can use, what colors we shouldn't be using, because people sometimes do, you know, daff things, or they, they bring a slide in from another presentation, from old branding, and then you've got this mismatch of old slides, new slides, that it could just get a bit of a, it can get a bit of a mess, to be honest with you. Now, I am not an advocate of having your branding logo necessarily on every slide. I personally don't think that's a necessary requirement, because I think that the people know who you are, I think it's quite okay to have things on your cover slide, your introduction slide, and to have it on your final wrap up slide, I don't think they need to be on every slide. So that's something where I'll probably disagree with lots of, lots of marketing people and comes people. But I do think you need to have some consistency, you know, you, you need to have consistency so that when we go from one slide to another, the, the size of the title font isn't changing, it's not changing from here to here. When that happens, it's distracting our audience all the time, because they're looking at a slide, and we've got, we go from one slide to another, and we've got a nice aligned title box here, it should be the same font, it should be the same place. If it's all jumbled up, it's kind of jumping in the, you know, the audience notice that, and it's distracting. We don't want to have that distraction, and why don't we want that distraction? Well, if we're presenting, we want the audience to be listening to what we're saying the day, not looking at the slides going, you know, eat, and trying to work out what, what it is, or be distracted by the slides, we want them to be listening to what we're saying. That's really important. If it's a PDF, it's a different scenario, and maybe that doesn't matter because you probably go from like you're scrolling down on a screen, and you might not notice that, that, that titles out, but on it, when on a presentation in front of people, it's the type of thing that can be distracting for people, you know, fonts, different font sizes, you know, we just don't really, we don't want that. At the end of the day, they're supposed to be listening to us. Our slides are at age to our presentation, and I think a lot of people would use them as their crutch for what they're going to say. That's the problem, so they tend to pile loads and loads of text onto a slide because that's what they want to talk about, rather than, rather than having minimal, minimal fonts on the text or words on the on the slide, and actually talking about the concept. And that's where you go, go, go wrong quite a lot. What makes template successful? I think a lot of companies I work for, they have, I really get a little bit angry because they have bullet points, and then they have one bullet, no, two bullet points, three bullet points, two eight bullet points, all these. Then they have it for a little bit longer text, and then for a long text with the bullet points, and every time it looks, yeah, looks the same, I think, oh, then it's too complicated to find her at one. For me, it makes me, be really unethy, also, what I also hate was the pagination, because I have a different kind of work. So I have one big presentation for all, and then I do the presentation, I say, okay, for the management CO speech, I only need these five, and then it's do something, I have, I don't know, from other than page one, page 23, that's the one, and they ask, oh, what with the other slides? I was a little bit unhappy, but yeah, what makes this template successful, and especially how many freedom should I give my employees to work with these templates? Okay, I think you need to have a good selection of layouts. You need to, in my opinion, you always need to have a brand layout, okay, like a title only, layout, a lot of the, a lot of corporate templates I see haven't got a title only layout, and that means that people then are having to kind of start deleting placeholders to do, you know, to be creative, but I think that's a bit limiting. So I think it's nice to have a title only layout that might be some branding on it, I think it's nice to have a title only layout which has no branding on it, when I say no branding on it, I mean, no logo, in it, because you've still got the title in the same place if you're using the title, but it just gives you that freedom to add what you need to and to build the sliving switch as well, okay, I think that's kind of important. I was the question, the question was around what does it need to have? It needs to have a decent number of layouts as well, because all too many of the ones that I see don't have enough layouts, and you're really stuck to not very creative layouts. I mean, I think some very strange ones, I've seen some layouts with like a title and content where the content is about third, like the content placeholder is like the last third of a slide, I like, well, it's that sort of so that people don't put much content there, but what's the rest of the slide going to have on it? And very strange, but I also think a lot of, and this sort of links to a copier as well, I think a lot of image placeholders, I think that's an important one as well to have a good selection of image placeholders. And that could be, that could be mostly image with, I don't know, something, you know, solids along the bottom, which is then where you're going to have your title, you know, it's just breaking things up a bit, you know, that's really, really important just to have that section there broken up. Yeah, I think, actually, the half topic, okay, on the overview Microsoft product, it's copilot and AI. And yeah, I, okay, it's a little bit longer, but I think they all, we have copilot and powerpoint and I tried out, and I was, the live-dequeen, not amused, because it's, yeah, it saves me, what, what, I know, so okay, can you please make something? And then it says, yeah, you have to click the area, you have to click the area, it's was a little bit like Clippy, I think. And then I have a stub you as in copilot in powerpoint. So, what's your perspective on, on, on copilot and, in, yeah, in, powerpoint? It is, it's getting better, but I still think it's got a long way to go, to be honest with you. I think copilot is really, really good for helping people, it's either before they vote in powerpoint. And even if they don't have paid license, they can go to copilot chat on web browser and they can start asking questions. So, I think copilot is brilliant before, before you're starting, okay, so, as the, if you've got the paid license, you have speak feature in the web browser. So, you can hook that and you can have a dialogue with copilot. So, or you, with the, with the basic version, you can dictate. So, you can dictate and you can start saying, right, I'm working on this presentation and these are the thoughts, you know, start telling it what you want to say in the presentation. Just do, it's like a brain dump of verbal brain dump. The reason why this works so well is because you're not tight them. If you're typing, I can't touch tight, so I'm very slow at talking. So, I think, you know, been able to brain dump my ideas is really useful. So, I'm blabbering away, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, lots of them, lots of ours, not my presentation, but it helps to be gathered, the thoughts and puts thoughts together. And then if you were to say, well, the audience is, whoever the audience is, you know, I'm presenting Erson, it's a 10 minute presentation, this is my audience, this is what I want to achieve, I want to achieve whatever X, give it all that information and then see what copilot comes back with because it might, it will help you structure a presentation and put your ideas, you know, into a flow. Copilot is also very good for helping people come up with hooks for presentations. So, let's say the thoughts sides are finished, this is something I would do in PowerPoint training sessions. I often get asked, oh, can you include copilot in PowerPoint training? And it's a bit challenging because you've, it's not just a case of what to do in PowerPoint because you've got to set up personalization, you've got to set up a memories, you know, you've got to kind of do everything else and then the vendors the PowerPoint beets. So it's a bit challenging. So I would tend to go down the route when training of what PowerPoint, what copilot can help you, almost like with the finished presentation. So I will get my trainees to come with the finished presentation. They're not sharing it with anybody, it's just to work with on their own computer. And then I'll say to them, how would you normally start this presentation? And then, you know, they're thinking about that, that's not that loud, but they're thinking about that. And then I'll say to the next ask copilot to come up with a hook for the presentation, tell them the emergence that you present in this too. They might have speaker notes in there, there's probably going to be text on the slides. So copilot will get a good idea of what presentation he about and it will suggest some hooks, some how to stop presentation and get people's attention. So all often people start by, well, maybe if they, if you think people don't know who they are, they'll start by saying, my name is, and I'm going to talk about if it worked, they might not do the my name is bit, but, you know, they're just saying this is my presentation and it's about whatever, whereas they could start with a hook, which is going to grab people's attention. Okay. So copilot is very good for that. It's also very good for coming up with endings. So like, how do I end my presentation? That could be a call to action. It could be, you know, a summary to ask copilot for some smart ways to end the presentation. Rather than just that's it. Thank you very much. That's people tend to finish or a question slide. You know, that's okay, but let's have a smart finish afterwards and copilot can be really helpful with that. It could also be very helpful with anticipating questions from different audiences. So you might have one presentation and it might be delivered to different audiences. Okay, it might be tweaks like with the presentation, but how is this, how is my, how are the finance team? What questions the finance team will ask about the presentation? And it's going to look at it from the lens of a finance director and come back to you with, well, this is what they're interested in. So it's helping you either shape the presentation or anticipate questions, which I think is really important. And it's it's a use for copilot people don't think about, they think about creating slides and only creating slides. So I think there's definitely more that we can do from that perspective. I think the image generation has got a lot better now. So we use it for creating images. Now I'm doing a lot of training decks so they can be a bit more from. Okay, so that's a different scenario to presenting to the executive committee. So that's the first thing I would, I would say, but I use copilot recently for training session I was doing and the client wanted me to help their staff. So they just moved over to teams. They wanted me to help their staff understand the difference between teams, it's a channel. What do we have a channel? Teams, a channel and chat. They just said people were struggling with it. So I said, okay, and I asked copilot, can you come up with some analogies to explain that concept? And it came back with a few, but one really jumped out to me and I thought, no, that's good. I quite like that. And I think it would resonate. So it came that with teams is like a filing cabinet and office filing cabinet. And then is the draw within that filing cabinet and then your files and meetings are like within that draw and then you've got chat, which is like a separate platform. It's almost like sort of stabbing next to the meeting room. So that was always, so he's standing next to the filing cabinet. The whole thing was really good at LG because it does help explain to people what the difference is. But then I said, I picked one of the image generation modes. I think I went with the Black Forest Labs one. So with the paid license, we've got different modes that we can use in copilot have in PowerPoint and we've got a couple specifically for images. So I chose one of those and said, now I want you to create an image that will all images like cartoon light ones because they didn't want real ones. Cartoon like images that would represent that analogy. I don't have to do a few tweaks, but it came up with some really nice images that representatives that an analogy for people for the filing cabinet and the draw and then light and separate separate kind of meetings and that. But I think it's very good for helping with that scenario. I think some of the issues are, sometimes I will get copilot say I've got some quality text on slide and I say, try to come up with a better slide for me. I find one of the issues is it tends to be and it can pick up branding but then you don't have the lay, it's not picking up a layout and then you probably got to go back and you might have to edit. Sometimes it isn't always the color palette and you've got a bit of tidying up to do. So I think there's that to be aware of and even though copilot can do things like align content on slide, I could do it quick and myself if I knew the tools where the tools are. Do you know what I mean? It can be slow on doing some of those tasks. Now what is good with copilot in PowerPoint is that now you can ask copilot to do something and you could be working on another slide. So you know what I mean? So it's giving you that power to wait for copilot to do whatever it's doing. My for anybody that is using it that way is if you're asking copilot to do something to one slide and whilst it's working you're going to go away and work on another slide, put the slide number into your prompt. So whatever you asking copilot to do say do it, you know, make changes to slide 14 and put that slide number in because what I did handle pattern a few times recently was it actually because I clicked on the slide and I was then editing or creating that slide. It was then trying to make the changes to slide. I was working hard rather than the one I was asked it to prompt. So just make sure you put the slide number in if you work away in copilot. Did you or well did you see the the yeah or I try to ask is more more nicely one but yeah okay where do this co-pilot actually struggle from your perspective? I think I think still I think one of the things is that it's hard it's the difference between the types of presentations that I often say to copilot this is a presentation that is going to be used on stage so I want you know I don't want I want you to come up with something with no words or very little words and then it gets that concept yes that we've got different types of presentations I think it's just seen one type of presentation at one dex soot or which I already said the beginning it doesn't we've got different scenarios of where we would use copilot and I think that's the biggest thing at the moment wouldn't it be nice to say this is a deck I'm going to present the executive committee and I want it to look like a slide deck that you know I wanted to be able to understand how that works or this is going to be for a handout PDF it's not going to ever be presented in person and for it to realize that then it's more like a you know the document rubles and the slide because that's where I think it's it's kind of hard work it doesn't really get the the difference it yeah and you will AI or copilot eventually replace the presentation designs I don't think it will because I think it's it's it's working alongside the 10 plates and I also think that you still got to come up with the ideas you still got to just still that my dear down into that message and I I still think you're going to need designers to be honest I do and what what how did you see over the years what powerpoint presentation skills will become more valuable over the next years and which one are less important I still think you need those fundamentals I really do because you know you still might need to tidy things up I mean you can get copilot to do so much for you but I still think you need those fundamentals and I also think what's going to become quite important is you know the tools we're using when we're presenting so though often overlooked we always think about slide design and what slides look like which of course is very important but that's not the whole picture unless it's a PDF of course um it's our delivery so when we're delivering the presentation when we're actually verbally getting a presentation to people we need to be confident with using putt we using powerpoint and I find that people still aren't familiar with the tools we've got say in the present of you quite often when I'm going through I always always try and encourage somebody to let me or an organization I said we'll do some presentation tools as well but I go oh we'll find it presenting and then I'll say do you um do you know about this tool where you can get to the end of your presentation and if somebody asks to see a slide at the beginning can we get back to that chart that we just you know you looked at yeah that's fine we'll go straight to that chart with that looking at all the other slides and they go oh didn't know you could do that so it's it's been like that and the other way I'll frame that one this is called seal slide so you press one seat press the seal slides button you on your presenter view will see all those slides and then you click on anyone just to go to that slide and the upwards will be taken in the room straight to that slide another scenario for that one is if it gets yet it makes people come across as a really good presenter because if they're running out of time which often happens maybe there's more of a conversational type presentation it could be a mod to the update we could include these few slides in the following months they can you know at the end of that topic just goes to the last slide and wrap up and it always looks like no on time you know it's just the little things like that and I was doing some copilot training with an organisation recently senior leadership team and one of them said this is like it happened to be to do with PowerPoint but they they weren't aware of that they said to me is there any way that we can have like I think it was a translation translation you know when we're presenting I said translation it's what we could do you could be nice to do that in PowerPoint for that four years what yeah I said yep so I went into the presenter view that they were thinking copilot can copilot do this and I said well it's not it is an AI tool but it's not copilot anybody can do this so I went into the presenter view I said you can put live subtitles on we went into the subtitle settings that's another feature people that obviously aren't aware of all that I find they're not aware of so we put the live subtitles on and I said as well as the subtitles obviously that's an accessibility feature to start with but now we've got 72 different languages that we can that's sent to languages from English we've got other languages that we can translate from to I think English to 72 is probably the most but we is 72 different languages and we can have a translation service as well now it is it doesn't work and it's it's somewhat slow I suppose in the way that it has to structure the grammar because it will translate word for word and then at the end of the sentence it will reorganize for the grammar of the other language so we have to be aware of that I suppose when we're speaking that we might want to speak a little bit slower so that they can read when it reorganizes itself but my senior leadership team were absolutely delighted because they then said right we can save money on this this miss and start taking those. Yeah, but do you have any of that rego? Yeah, I think building slides is yeah only the half of the challenge I will say I think the other part is the presentation or the presentation how can people become better presentations? So we have a few really good tools in PowerPoint one is a newer tool once been around for a long time there is a feature called rehearsed timings that's been around since I think 2008 as well so 18 years this one is really useful if you have a timed presentation so for the couple of this is maybe you've got I know people that have maybe do their college it's for the college course or it's for an award application and they have 10 minutes and at the end of 10 minutes that's it they will be told stock you can practice with this rehearse timings feature and what PowerPoint would do is every time you go to a new slide it will put that an automatic transition into PowerPoint on that slide so but you know how long you've spent on the slide so if you're going over you can see and you practice out loud never any head always out loud you know in a room on your own or to somebody and you can see what you're you know how long you're spending on each slide because then you might say well I've got 10 minutes and I spent three minutes on one slide that's too long I need to cut that down and that will allow you to do that you do need to take those transitions off otherwise it will automatically run the next time you you've voted that slide but that's really really helpful and then we also have the presenter coach which is an AI tool not nobody has this and it will give you feedback on your presentation so you can have live feedback you can have a little bit in the corner a little it's like a little rectangle in the corner that will give you live feedback it will tell you if you are talking too slow if you're talking too fast it will prompt you if you're reading the words on the slide if you are what else do we have monotone any ums and ars like I've just done there um we tend to use filler words ums and ars when we're talking too fast so if we slow speech down we tend to use less filler words because our brain is working you know I'm as otherwise I'm like you're going too fast for our brain to catch up but you at the end of running this tool you get a report and it will give you you know the details of what you have there so are you monotone you know how's your pitch how's your pace how many words per minute um if also if you've said any words that might be offensive so to make sure we've been inclusive of people okay one one one one term we tend to use in Ireland where i'm based is we tend to say guise for a group of people so i would my two daughters guise come on it's time to get into car whereas in other countries they that will be you know i'm really talking to men and i'm not talking to women in the room so you know things like that pick up if i was presenting with it was actually could use another word instead of guise it's things like that as well and uh yeah that's the one thing i i as a younger i really love it as animations i would so many animations in my my power points advice especially at school uh yeah what did you say kill for the owner or this this truck team i think used smartly very useful okay i don't because i'm working with corporates i tend not to be teaching like advanced uh fancy tricks because that's not what got people the my cook my audience that's that i'm what what my audience are interested in but yes i think animations are fine i think if you do have i'm not gonna say bully too uh text but let's say you don't have time to do much else and you don't know how else to do things and you've got bullet points in there just animated so you're only there's only one point at a time so you're talking you know animated adi talking about it same is smart arts you can animate the smart arts as well so that you know the point is coming in when you're talking about it rather than having everything on the slide good we have the more feature now which is a transition actually but it can replace a lot of the individual animation features and that allows you to sort of change things from one slide to another so a nice use for that is almost like an animation tool in the way that you can maybe like have a rectangle over a table and you can like move the rectangle down with each slide so that you're just revealing content as you go that looks quite nice generally speaking if people are using animation i would say just go for the subtle or the appear one just give it simple rather than things zooming in from all over the place and yeah i think a little bit about the storytelling um how can powerpoint or co-painted help yeah tell better better stories or a lot of or i said for data storytelling it's one of the of the basmones from the last year so what did you think here i think how quite it's very good for this type of scenario so again i think you know if you've got a part if you've got to finish presentation get get co-pilot to sort of review that for you and see is that making sense is the flow working there to be you know would people understand this this chart what what is this how does this table represent something that's what i'd be thinking um on that topic the standard charts in Microsoft are not very very colorful and they they're not great i don't think to be honest because it's not always clear what people you know what data is trying to stand out so there are some sort of classic data these type scenarios some people like and some people don't but things like changing most of the the set to say about bar chart changing the series to gray then changing one bar or one column to a different color and that's the one that you want people to look at so it's particularly good for more data visualization type type work i don't think co-pilot is very i haven't we try co-pilot with that to be honest yet okay i think it's good for the storytelling part but i'm supposed from from the data vis state of visualization perspective i think we can quickly change the charts ourselves manually to get a better a better chart than from like a sort because that's pad on your set yeah uh yeah um so oh it's a time we're running a little bit of time so i have in every um round i have a quick fire round so i ask short bested and you give her a short answer that's okay Fiona okay uh power void feature everyone should start using tomorrow oh that would have to be the alignment tools is there a most overrated power park feature uh unrurated um probably three day in smart art when such a little yet comes to you more to you and say Fiona i give you all the resources money you need to develop your favorites power point feature what should it be oh um i think it would be something of an account text i think it would be like change this presentation from a from a pdf into a debt that can be presented on stage at a conference like that uh again this or obisky or any so obisky um i don't really like it let's be honest i'd probably go more for a whiskey cocktail mark and the kids i should need uh i live just down the road from the jenison's distillery so they make jenison down the road yeah i say whiskey i think dag what are light mode uh light mode and on presentation lights uh designer dark designer uh said that one again uh and on the uh a light design or a dark design on on power point presentations um light design a power point or whiteboard for brainstorming oh um i think i think brainstorming adside a power point would be better so whiteboard yeah i have one in my office as well so i think just right i think we're manually writing things down is very powerful you ought to be around starting in power point i know it's supposed to be quick work quick fire round but i think that's one the biggest mistakes people make is they open power point and start creating slides in power point when they actually haven't thought about what they want to do and that can be quite challenging i think you better off you know brainstorming first and then go to power point and is there any big power point moved out there you will bust i think it's that power point uh death by power point power point sorry resting you know see all these posts on linkedin resting piece power point power point is dead power point isn't dead because it's or corporate using it and you know a lot of corporates are not going to move away from microsoft just because there's other tools out there and there's there's AI tools out there some companies will maybe go to other tools but majority of them will stay what they need what they already have so no it is not there's no RIP power point and what was the best presentation you have i've seen best present to oh god i can think of all the ones that have that weren't very good uh probably would be one that i went to the presentation summit a couple of times in california so it would be one of the presentations there i can't think of a specifically the definitely one of the ones there because that's all of the power point gurus presenting there yeah i think that's the the the the really interesting um and what did you think about the future of power point how will it look in in five years how would it look in five years um i would like to think that it would look more slides would look more fit for purpose as in you know not so much content on the slides when people are actually presenting um i don't think she's saying not everybody's using copilot a paid licensing copilot so you know even in the corporate time working with they might have a certain you know not everybody necessarily has a copilot license so i still think it's not like it's going to be we go in an a i does everything because not everybody's going to have you know not every company is investing in all of their staff i can copen it's a big cost for a bit for a large company so i think it's probably still going to look similar enough to what we have today but maybe there'll be more standard a i things that will do things quicker for us but i don't necessarily mean creating a whole deck for us you know what i mean and um yeah when uh on the next podcast who guess will you nominate i scrolls in white and what secret questions shall i ask oh gosh um is this in general for who you're wrong off topics oh i'll ask them back to you on that one okay yeah um so then my closing question is um what is the one thing every listener should remind from this session i think so what should every listener remember from this session i think it's these these fundamentals so it's going to have a look for the arranged tools the selection pay and things like that and set up your quick access tool but put those on your quick access tool but that'll be my my lack of so yeah if you're a thank you so much for drawing me today um the people find all the informations about you in the show notes on the MC65 and podcast stage yeah it was first seen the editing to learn how much deep there are really it's yeah behind these tools is that i don't know millions or 100 millions of people you still can't be a single day yeah um yeah i would say thank you i think it's really interesting i have to try out the the the default card next and yeah to all the listeners thank you for listening the MC65 podcast so if you like it share it with your audience your clients your friends and yeah um yeah thank you again if you want have a nice day and thank you for staying here with us all with me thank you thanks really invite