Three years ago, when Microsoft first announced they were bringing M365 Copilot into the world, the amazing demo video promised us it would do decks like this:

Today, it’s easy to say “yeah, riiiiight…” when watching an animation like it. But back in 2023, only four months after ChatGPT launch — who knew what AI was going to be like? No one did. We only had the word from the tech companies on what they were building and promising us.

Today we know better. As do the engineering teams behind every tech company that has tried to make LLMs do the kind of magic as their promo videos suggest. We have gained (and lost) some pretty neat AI video generation tools for building such promo animations from simple prompts. But what have we really gotten when it comes to actual, non-hallucinated information worker tools?

One thing’s for sure: we have gotten an endless stream of preview features and changes to how the Copilot tools should work. It’s nearly impossible to follow the real story, even when narrowing it down to something like Power Platform. I’ve tried my best on that front and reported back what I’ve learned in the weekly newsletter you see here.

This time, though, I’m touching something outside Power Platform. It’s kind of the honorary member, though. If Microsoft hadn’t launched PowerPoint, would any of the other Power tool brands have come to life? Probably not. And it’s not just about the brand but also the pattern for empowering information workers. When I saw Power Apps canvas apps for the first time, I thought to myself: “this is what all PowerPoint decks should be like in the future: interactive apps, not static documents”.

Just like there are many ways to build an app in Power Platform, there are a lot of options for how to create a presentation with the help of Copilot. Let’s start with the question: how many ways exactly?

I don’t know if that’s the right answer. No one does. And regardless, tomorrow there might be seven ways in total. But this week, when I looked at the options, that’s how many methods I discovered. And I decided to document the details for others to benefit from. You can find them on this page:

I took a test drive on all of them, using the same source data and prompt. Not only did I look at the UI, process and outputs myself — I also uploaded the .pptx files into Claude. Since they are basically a .zip file and follow the documented OOXML file format, an LLM should be able to analyze them like any other code artifact. And it sure seems like it was.

Here’s the main discovery: no AI tool in Microsoft’s cloud today can create a proper PowerPoint document that is A) formatted right and B) looks good. You have to compromise — a lot. You also need to be ready for disappointments because there’s no intuitive way for the user to know what each Copilot experience will actually do. In the words of Forrest Gump: “it’s a box of chocolates”.

The other key point is that this isn’t going to magically get better. We’ve waited for three years now and the experience still sucks, just in novel ways. While you can get outputs that on the surface look ready to present, the crucial thing to understand is that these are more like pictures than proper .pptx files. You don’t have the structure nor editability that a native PowerPoint document should offer.

Now it’s time to look at each of the methods I was able to test for creating a PowerPoint presentation with the help of Microsoft AI in March 2026.

This is the O.G. version in the sense that it’s been around the longest and also uses the least modern experience in Copilot. You can access it when opening the PowerPoint client and going to create a new presentation. It’s the first option, even before “start with a blank presentation”, so you cannot miss it. You give a prompt + reference docs (from the file types MS decides to support), pick from available themes, choose your preference of AI-generated images. And then you sit back and wait for a while.

The output is “okay”. The theme determines what the general style is going to be and it’s consistent. There are images, sure, but they are bland GenAI clipart that is more about decoration and less about helping to visualize the specific concepts of your presentation. The slide layouts aren’t very exciting, which of course is also common in human-authored decks.

The worst part here is that the presentation goes on and on and on. Out of all the five ways, this method to create a PowerPoint document with Copilot does not offer any control for presentation length. So, we get 32 slides about something that definitely isn’t worth all that space. Microsoft was supposed to introduce a setting that allows the user to adjust the output length but I only ever saw it in screenshots shared by MVPs, so I guess it got scrapped. Giving the length verbally hasn’t worked either, at least when I’ve tested it earlier.

There’s been a lot of fuss about full Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat becoming available inside every app — from Dynamics 365 to Power Apps to Office apps. Based on this, it’s perfectly reasonable for the user to expect that they could start the slide deck creation from within the chat pane now. And sure, they can — it’s just that the results are going to be pretty wild:

This is literally the Most Minimum Viable Product for generating slides. There’s absolutely nothing here that’s about PowerPoint. We just get a text document that’s presented as a few bullets per slide. And the text is terrible, too. Did we travel back to pre-ChatGPT days all of a sudden? Where did Microsoft pull this GPT-1 model from?

From the thinking traces in the chat, we see that Copilot just decided to execute python-pptx code directly. It skipped everything about design and just vomited the raw text inside the OOXML markup without worrying about anything else. Now, if the bullets would have at least decent substance in them, it would have been relatively easy for the user to start applying themes, adjusting layouts, and making it their own. But when people see this kind of output, no one’s gonna bother with the AI assistant anymore.

It’s wild how Microsoft will let this happen inside their products. A user paying $30/month for the premium M365 Copilot can all of a sudden just get the equivalent of a Notepad text file when they expected something closer to a polished Word document.

What used to be “Agent Mode” got rebranded as “Edit with Copilot” recently, because that’s what MS does. And based on a social post I saw a few days ago, they intend to just keep on reimagining this feature:

Whatever it’s called by the time you read it, this is presumably what Method 2 should be like. But since I made the rookie mistake of using PowerPoint on my Windows 11 instead of the PowerPoint web client in my browser, I didn’t get these capabilities. Silly me, expecting Microsoft’s PC software to offer a premium experience compared to whatever runs in my Google Chrome browser.

When that tiny PowerPoint icon is present in the tools area of Copilot Chat, the AI assistant engages in a targeted dialog with me about the presentation I want to build. I get to choose a template (these are entirely different from Method 1, btw) as well as select options for the purpose, audience and length of the presentation. Now, this is a smart, simple way to present things in the Copilot sidecar and I want to tell Microsoft “good job!”👍

The presentation produced by ‘Edit with Copilot’ is massively better than the output from ‘Create with Copilot.’ Of course. It makes perfect sense that to create something good, you should choose the edit tools…

The theming is not something you could just change from the Design tab of your PowerPoint client app, though. Well, you can, but it’s gonna be a mess. It’s obvious that this method uses PowerPoint Online tooling that doesn’t have an offline counterpart today. We also don’t get SmartArt or other rich artifacts that regular PowerPoint users would be familiar with. The output is therefore an AI artifact that isn’t intended to be modified by hand. Rather, the idea must be that I’d just keep chatting with Copilot if I want things changed. So, a bit like “PowerPoint without the Power part”.

It’s still all about AI agents in the tech industry of 2026, the definition just keeps changing all the time. Anyway, this could be considered the flagship experience that Microsoft product team is most proud of. At least if you read the blog post Introducing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot from November 2025. This is the experience they talk about:

Arguably it is the closest thing to that animated demo video from three years ago in terms of how the agent presents itself and what the output looks like. It’s almost as if MS had showed their old marketing video to a frontier model in GitHub Copilot and said “build this, but make it real software code”.

This gets us to the heart of the dilemma that Microsoft’s Office teams have faced: large language models like GPT have been trained with vast troves of content presentation technologies that have been accessible to them in the web. They are brilliant at generating HTML, as a result. At the same time, they are still very clumsy with Office Open XML. Because despite OOXML being “an open standard”, in reality it’s more about packaging the legacy of MS Office docs into zipped XML files and telling the world anyone can use it.

With not enough public training data to make the agents fluent in OOXML, and no in-house frontier model to challenge the partner labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, Microsoft is stuck. This has led the Redmond developers to choose the same path as everyone else. Their flagship AI agent needs to use HTML first, then convert that into PowerPoint files. And it’s not even hidden at all because we see the agent thinking out loud about these steps:

The decks from this process do look modern. And can you guess why that is? Yes! Because these files are not real PowerPoint presentations. They are simply HTML and CSS that has been rendered in a way that looks like a slide deck. Microsoft does an after-the-fact conversion of this content into OOXML files. It’s public information, documented in their blog post.

What is not said out loud is which app features are being given up in exchange for this shiny surface. The resulting PowerPoint file does not use themes, colors, slide layouts, placeholders, SmartArt, speaker notes… While the content you see on the screen is technically included in the file, that same applies to even PDF documents. It’s easy to get things stored in a file and presented to those who open it. But the whole point of PowerPoint is in how the presenter can work with the content.

I would totally approve this kind of “flat” output that skips the native PowerPoint application functionality if the deck was generated by a company not called “Microsoft”. It’s particularly puzzling, given the phrases that are used in the blog post section “Key Differentiators of Our Approach”:

At least when it comes to presentations, this doesn’t seem to be the reality when looking at the results from this process. This first part surely is true: “Instead of generating Office files directly, the agent produces an intermediate representation that is later transformed into fully compatible Office documents.” As for the claims of how the use of a headless version of PowerPoint in the cloud somehow results in a superior result in document quality — sorry, but this doesn’t seem to be true at all.

One way to validate it is to try out a version of a process that has not been built by Microsoft, but rather Anthropic.

This is the hottest part of Microsoft 365 Copilot today, largely because it promises to make Copilot work the way Claude already does. Whereas on the consumer side of Copilot, Microsoft appears to be building their own solution with Copilot Tasks (behind a waitlist currently), on the business side they’ve decided to license the Claude Cowork technology from Anthropic and put a M365 badge on it.

Actually, they do a bit more with it than that. I’m cautiously optimistic about what Copilot Cowork could deliver, and especially the synergies in this partnership. Anthropic could keep doing the experimental stuff with their AI lab vibes, while Microsoft could host it inside their cloud and try to make it credible enough for the enterprise (the Azure OpenAI services playbook). See my Cowork vs. Cowork comparison page for more details, and my LinkedIn post for quick thoughts on it.

Now, back to the main agenda. How does Copilot Cowork build PowerPoint decks? In a similar but technically different way than PowerPoint Agent in Copilot. The process is more explicit about the steps and hides less about what’s going on during the slide creation. We see again that the presentation is first generated in an intermediate format, then converted into a PowerPoint document.

The file details reveal to us that this process uses PptxGenJS. “The most popular powerpoint+js library on npm with 3,500 stars on GitHub”. An open source library created by Brent Ely, compatible with PowerPoint, Keynote, LibreOffice, and other OOXML apps. There’s definitely no “headless PowerPoint” involved in how Copilot Cowork builds its presentations.

How does the resulting presentation compare to the PowerPoint Agent? It’s not that different. Neither one uses layouts, placeholders, themes, styles, SmartArt. There’s no image generation available in Copilot Cowork, because Claude famously does not bother on such tech. Microsoft haven’t yet had the chance to incorporate any GPT-image models into the mix to bridge this gap. If there were any such artifacts available in the pipeline, PptxGenJS sure could incorporate into the slides, as we can see on its interactive feature demos page.

As a conclusion, out of the five methods to generate PowerPoint presentations with Microsoft’s Copilot products, none can deliver both A) good looks and B) proper structure. The below quadrant was how Claude Sonnet 4.6 graded each option, based on analysis of the raw .pptx files produced from them. See the details on this separate page.

I’m amazed at how a community library on GitHub with platform-agnostic tooling is basically on par with what Microsoft’s own Office team are able to ship today. At least if we look at the top half of the quadrant and aim for a nicely designed slide deck as an output. Rather than a PowerPoint document that is easy to manually edit inside the client app, which is something mostly relevant for the company that sells the PowerPoint software.

If everything should really be done via the “UI for AI” through chatting with an agent, does editing the PowerPoint deck through the native Office tools even matter anymore? I believe it does, especially based on the absolutely infuriating experience I had in my tests with PowerPoint Agent. If generating new decks can be rough, trying to get Copilot to change the output from it is a whole new level of pain.