Give Copilot a template it can work with

Yes, and how well it does depends on how the template is built. Copilot builds slides from your layouts, so clear layouts and good sample slides make a big difference.

Yes. Claude in PowerPoint works inside your template and picks up its layouts, fonts and theme colours. Well-named layouts help it choose the right one. At the time of writing, it is recommended to use the Claude add-in for PowerPoint, rather than the desktop or web app, to build and edit slides.

It depends. Sometimes an upgrade is the quickest route. But often it's quicker, and better, to build a new template from scratch. It stays true to your brand and is informed by your current template, but doesn't inherit the things that weren't built properly in the first place. We'll recommend a route once we've looked at how it's built.

Three things: a well-built template, a Copilot Brand Kit set up properly, and people who know how to direct the AI. We can help with all three.

If you are used to being able to define and adjust paragraph styles in Word, then you will be sorely disappointed by PowerPoint. You will not find that functionality there.

But you can use the list levels to define up to nine different text styles for text placeholders, which is usually more than enough for most needs. And we can go a bit further for you: we can make these styles work in tables and text box shapes as well.

Yes, these can be built into the template so that users and AI can access them. We have a suggested approach to border formats, and we can also make the same text styles available in tables.

That depends on what you are going to use the slides for. If you  are creating documents, the a good starting point for body text is 14pt. If you are creating training slides, or other text-light presentations then you’ll probably want something bigger - maybe around 24pt. The font you have selected will also play a part; some fonts are simply bigger than others.

Ideally, you will have around four set sizes: very large for title slides, large for slide titles, standard for text, and smaller for diagrams, charts and tables. When working on a template, we always ask for examples of your existing content which we then mock up in the new style. That way you can try a few different sizes on for size.

Whichever size you settle on, the most important thing is to design the template to produce font sizes are self-consistent throughout the deck.

If you want to use the custom font that you have chosen for your website, that is possible. But – and it is a huge but – that is usually not a good idea. It throws up all sorts of compatibility issues. And the PowerPoint approach to fonts is evolving. We can talk you through the pros and cons and help you pick the best way through the font minefield.

The short answer is not very much. You can choose a different default by right-clicking on one of the table styles and choosing Set as default. We’d recommend the first column, second row called No Style, Table Grid. This has no formatting apart from a basic grid, so you can create your content and then put your own formatting in place. But unfortunately you’ll have to set this default in every new file.

When we build a template, we include custom table styles for you, and set one of these as your default. So anyone who creates a new table gets a brand-compliant, elegant style. (Not that stripey, over-formatted one.)

Our advice is to limit how often the logo looms large in your slides. If you are presenting to a customer or supplier, you don’t need to be reminding them of your brand on every slide. Give them enough credit for remembering who they are listening to. And if your deck is for an internal audience, they already know who they work for.

So what should you do? We advise three things: firstly, limit the logo to title slides, section headers and other key ‘moments’ in your decks. Secondly, design a small, subtle icon or marker on each slide so that the brand is there, but not interfering with – or distracting from – the content. Thirdly, use brand hints in the design of elements of your slides: photo placeholder shapes, table styles, or even bullets.

We can help you find the best compromise between brand experience and slide practicality.

Yes, it’s possible to add custom colours that appear under the automatically-generated ones. (PowerPoint’s algorithm does a poor job of generating these, particularly for heavily-saturated colours.)

It’s not something that can be done through the desktop application, but we can add them in for you. You can have up to 10 columns by 5 rows of additional colours.

It’s good practice to define a content area, which defines clear margins on every slide – and makes every slide feel like part of a coherent deck. There are two approaches to this in a good template: creating guides to define the content area, and then designing all slide layouts to adhere to those.

Unfortunately, although PowerPoint can define these guidelines, it cannot implement guardrails: it won’t warn users if they stray outside these areas or don’t align to them. That’s why educating users on the benefits of guides and layouts is important. And we recommend building reminders and hints into the template.

Actually, it’s not a great idea to load your template with lots of photos, because they will bloat your file size and eat up memory.

Our approach is to never hard-code the photos in the layouts. Instead we will include one or two photos in the starter slides that are created with every new deck, so that there is something if people are happy to use the default. If not, they can simply swap the photo with something else.

To provide simple access to the rest of your images, we recommend creating a separate deck with slides already pre-populated with your approved photo bank. That way, your team can just open that photo deck, choose the layout they want with the photo they need, and paste that slide into their deck.

Absolutely. We can build you a Word template that has a very similar look and feel to your PowerPoint deck. With matching colours, fonts and text styles. And with coherent branding. You may find that you need more that one template: one for letters, one for proposals, one for more formal or legal documents. And so on; all using the same baseline style.

Although, because Word has different functionality – and because you'll probably want to work in a portrait orientation – there are some limitations on exactly how similar they can be. We'll advise you on the options. And if you need them, we can also create matching Excel templates.

Word & Excel templates can be deployed in the same way as PowerPoint templates. See the FAQ about rollout below.

This depends on your IT set-up. In simple terms, you have a choice between using over-the-air systems like InTune, or leveraging SharePoint. We can advise you and your IT teams on the pros and cons of both. For Copilot, the template is also added to the Brand Kit so it knows what to start with.

Plus we can help you educate your teams, to drive the adoption of the new template.