Prompt Crafting for Compelling Slides

1. Prompt Crafting for Compelling Slides

Welcome back! You've seen how Copilot can build a presentation outline from a single prompt.

2. Coming up...

In this lesson, we'll look at prompting best practices to create presentations that feel tailored, on-message, and just the right length for your audience.

3. Why Prompt Quality Matters

Imagine a colleague asks you, "Make me a PowerPoint about our product." What sort of presentation would you create?

4. Why Prompt Quality Matters

Probably something generic that would require several iterations and revisions to align with their expectations. Now imagine they say,

5. Why Prompt Quality Matters

"Make a 7-slide investor presentation explaining our EcoCharge EV Battery product - focus on benefits, market potential, and next steps."

6. Why Prompt Quality Matters

This contains information about the expected length, audience, topic, and key points to hit. That's real clarity. You can now create something that requires only minor refinements with this information. Copilot works the same way — the more structured your prompt, the better your slides. Let's see the difference with some examples.

7. Example 1: A Vague Prompt

Let’s first try a vague prompt: "Create a PowerPoint about the EcoCharge EV Battery." Copilot does what it can — it builds a basic deck and tries to hit what it thinks the main points should be. You can also get any number of slides, as the scope of the presentation isn't clear. The content is broad, the titles are generic, and it's not sure who the audience is. The slide titles aren't wrong, but they're not inspiring either.

8. Example 2: A Structured Prompt

Now, let's compare that with a clear, structured prompt: "Create a 7-slide PowerPoint introducing the EcoCharge EV Battery, our new home energy system. Focus on the benefits for homeowners, sustainability goals, and ROI. The audience is internal managers. Use a friendly but professional tone." This time, Copilot tailors every part of the deck — slide order, headings, tone, and summary — to these specifications. It might even add a closing slide with key takeaways, since it understands who the audience is and what they care about most.

9. How Copilot "Interprets" Prompts

Here's the key insight: Copilot doesn't just "fill slides." It interprets intent. When you mention

10. How Copilot "Interprets" Prompts

"for executives,"

11. How Copilot "Interprets" Prompts

it simplifies language, focuses on business impact, and adds high-level summaries. If you say

12. How Copilot "Interprets" Prompts

"for designers," it focuses on

13. How Copilot "Interprets" Prompts

visuals, user experience, and examples. That's why refining your prompt to include the target audience, tone, and structure gives Copilot the context it needs to deliver content that fits your goals.

14. Avoid These Mistakes

When writing prompts to create presentations with Copilot, there are three common mistakes to avoid: First, vagueness. Prompting "make it better" will leave Copilot guessing about how — was the audience, design, or narrative wrong? In this case, it's likely to guess wrong and leave you with more work to do. Second, overloading your prompts. We've seen that providing context to Copilot is key for quality slide decks, but it is possible to overdo this. Adding too many instructions or examples to your prompts can confuse the model and muddy the water. It's similar when giving instructions to a colleague. If you provide too much information, even if the information is all relevant, it can be overwhelming and mean that the most important information gets buried. Finally, missing the audience in your prompt — without knowing who it's for, Copilot defaults to a generic business style, which is unlikely to inspire your audience.

15. Let's practice!

Time to begin prompting your own compelling slides!

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