Copilot Cowork - Build PowerPoints in Your Design with Cowork

Overview:

Cowork ships with a built-in PowerPoint skill, and on its own it produces decks that are functional but generic. This session is about closing the gap between functional and on-brand. We will start by looking at how Cowork's PowerPoint skill works under the hood: how slides are generated, where layouts come from, and why default output rarely matches an organisation's design system. We will then build a custom PowerPoint skill that teaches Cowork your design: the master template, the title and section dividers, the colour palette, the fonts, the spacing, the icon style, and the slide structure your audience expects. We will work through real examples - a customer-facing pitch deck, an internal status review, and a training deck with speaker notes - and see how the same skill produces consistent, on-brand output across all three. We will also cover the practical edges: how to handle templates stored in SharePoint, how to keep the skill maintainable when the brand evolves, how to combine the PowerPoint skill with Deep Research for content, and what to do when Cowork gets it wrong. You will leave with a working PowerPoint skill, a method for adapting it to your own template, and a much shorter post-AI clean-up list.

Why you should Attend:

Everyone has had the same experience. You ask Copilot for a deck. It produces something. It is technically a deck. It is also generic, off-brand, the wrong colours, the wrong layout, and the title slide makes your communications team wince. So you spend the next forty minutes fixing it, and quietly wonder why you bothered using AI in the first place. The problem is not Cowork. The problem is that you have not told Cowork what your design actually looks like. Once you teach it, you stop getting generic decks and start getting decks that match your template, your typography, your colour palette, and your slide structure, every single time. This session shows you how. We build a PowerPoint skill from scratch, hand it your real template, and watch Cowork start producing decks that look like yours, not like everybody else's. By the end you will never let it ship a generic title slide again.

Areas Covered in the Session:

• How Cowork's built-in PowerPoint skill works, and why default output is generic
• Anatomy of a branded deck: master, layouts, palette, type, spacing, iconography
• Designing a custom PowerPoint skill that captures your design system
• Pointing Cowork at your real template stored in SharePoint or OneDrive
• Teaching Cowork your slide structure: title, agenda, content, section, close
• Worked example 1: a customer-facing pitch deck
• Worked example 2: an internal status review with consistent KPIs
• Worked example 3: a training deck with speaker notes in your voice
• Combining the PowerPoint skill with Deep Research, Excel, and Enterprise Search
• Maintaining the skill as the brand evolves, and handling the edge cases

Who Will Benefit:

• Communications & Marketing Teams - protecting brand consistency at scale
• Sales & Pre-Sales - producing customer-ready decks faster
• Consultants & Trainers - delivering polished material every time
• Microsoft 365 Champions - operationalising design through skills
• Designers & Brand Owners - encoding the design system into AI workflows