Friday, 5:30 p.m. The sales manager needs a deck for Monday's committee meeting. The sales report is a twelve-page Word document and the quarter's numbers sit in an Excel file nobody has cleaned up. He opens PowerPoint, asks Copilot to "make a sales presentation" and gets eight generic slides that could belong to any company.
He asked for very little and gave it no material. Copilot in PowerPoint builds fairly decent presentations when you hand it the right file and tell it who the audience is. The same goes for Word and Excel, although each app has its own strengths. This guide covers what Copilot does well in each one, with prompts you can copy and adapt, and when it makes sense to move from one app to the next.
If you're after the specific case of board presentations, we covered it in Board-ready presentations with AI and Copilot in PowerPoint. Here we stick to the general picture.
Before you start: what each user sees
What Copilot can do depends on the license. According to Microsoft's Copilot overview page, users without the add-on license but with standard access already get Copilot inside the apps: drafting, rewriting and summarizing in Word; analyzing data and creating formulas and charts in Excel; and in PowerPoint, creating presentations from a prompt or from existing content, summarizing them and applying deck-wide formatting changes. That access depends on service capacity and can vary during the day.
The Microsoft Copilot license adds priority access, search across your email, meetings and work documents, and more advanced features. We explain the differences in AI in Microsoft 365: what's included today.
One practical requirement people often forget: in Excel, Copilot works with files saved to OneDrive or SharePoint with AutoSave turned on. If the button doesn't show up in a workbook, check where it's saved first.
Copilot in PowerPoint: presentations from what you already have
Copilot in PowerPoint does its best work converting material that already exists. It can create a presentation from a Word document or a PDF, and since 2025 it lets you reference up to five files when building one, according to the Microsoft 365 Copilot release notes. When you start from an existing presentation, the result goes into a new file and the original stays untouched.
The July 2026 updates added two features that help a lot in companies with their own templates, according to the current release notes:
- Reusing the content and style of a previous presentation to build a new one, or applying one deck's theme and formatting to another.
- Creating slides from a Teams meeting or chat by mentioning it in the prompt.
A few prompts that get better results than "make a presentation":
- "Create an 8-slide presentation for the management committee from /Sales_report_Q3.docx. One slide per region, one on risks and one on next steps. Direct tone, no adjectives."
- "Add a section on the new discount policy in the same style as the rest of the deck."
- "Summarize this presentation in five points so I can email it to people who missed the meeting."
- "Apply the style of /Corporate_template_2026.pptx to this presentation."
What's still worth doing by hand: check every figure against the source, fix the charts (Copilot builds the structure and the text, but financial charts are better brought over from Excel) and cut text. The first version almost always has more words than fit on a slide someone has to present out loud.
Copilot in Word: drafts, reviews and summaries
Word is where the time savings show up fastest. Writing and rewriting is what a language model does best. According to Microsoft's Copilot application card, it can create, summarize and refine documents, turn text into tables and draft using other documents as reference.
Since June 2026, in Word for the web, Copilot can edit the document directly from the chat. Changes are tracked and can be undone, according to the release notes. You can turn this off if you'd rather review suggestions before they go into the text.
Try instructions like these:
- "Draft a two-page sales proposal for [client] using /Kickoff_meeting.docx and /Price_list.xlsx. Include scope, timeline and assumptions."
- "Rewrite section 3 for a non-technical reader. Keep the numbers."
- "Review this contract and list the clauses that mention payment terms or penalties."
- "Turn the list of requirements into a table with columns: requirement, owner, date."
The limit is judgment. Copilot doesn't know what you promised the client over the phone or which clause worries your lawyer. We use it for first drafts and for finding things in long documents. A person still reviews and signs off on the final version.
Copilot in Excel: analysis and formulas, with supervision
In Excel, Copilot suggests formulas, chart types and insights about your data. Since March 2026 there's "Edit with Copilot" (formerly Agent Mode), which builds and changes workbooks using tables, charts, PivotTables and formulas for more complex tasks, according to the release notes.
It works best with tidy data: clear headers, one row per record, no merged cells. If the sheet is a patchwork of blocks with subtotals in between, the first thing to ask for is a cleanup.
Some examples for spreadsheets:
- "Add a column with the margin percentage per product and highlight the ones below 15%."
- "Create a PivotTable of sales by rep and month, plus a line chart showing the trend."
- "Which three customers explain most of October's drop compared to September?"
- "Explain what the formula in cell F12 does and suggest a simpler version."
Always check the formulas it generates before using them in a report that goes to management. It often gets them right, but a wrong range slips through easily. We go deeper into this in From basic Excel to data analyst with Copilot.
Which app for which task
| Task | App | Note |
|---|---|---|
| First draft of a report or proposal | Word | Giving it reference documents improves the result a lot |
| Summarizing a long document or contract | Word | Ask for quotes or section numbers so you can check quickly |
| Cleaning data, calculating and comparing | Excel | File must be in OneDrive or SharePoint |
| Turning a report into slides | PowerPoint | Start from the Word file, not a blank prompt |
| Unifying the style of several decks | PowerPoint | Use a reference deck with the corporate style |
| Preparing material for a meeting | All three | Excel for the numbers, Word for the text, PowerPoint to present it |
A workflow we see working in sales and finance teams: analyze in Excel, write the conclusions in Word and generate the PowerPoint deck from that Word file. Each step gets a short review, and the result comes out noticeably better than asking PowerPoint for everything at once.
Users with a Microsoft Copilot license also get the Word, Excel and PowerPoint agents inside the Microsoft Copilot app, which create complete files from the chat. According to Microsoft Learn, they require the paid license and an admin who has enabled Anthropic models in the tenant. If a licensed user can't see them, that setting is the first thing to check.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a Copilot license to create presentations in PowerPoint?
Not always. Users with standard access can create presentations from a prompt or from existing content. The license adds priority access, search across your work data and advanced features such as the Word, Excel and PowerPoint agents.
Why doesn't Copilot show up in my Excel?
The most common reason is that the file isn't saved to OneDrive or SharePoint with AutoSave on. The account you're signed in with and your tenant's settings also play a part.
Does Copilot respect the corporate template?
Yes, if you give it the template. It can create presentations using your organization's templates and, since 2026, apply the style of a reference deck to another one.
Bring Copilot into your team's daily work
The gap between a generic deck and a useful one is usually the prompt and the material you give Copilot, and people learn that by practicing with their own work. At Disrupsoft we assess which scenarios in your company gain the most from Copilot, activate and configure it in your Microsoft 365, train users with their own documents and support adoption over time. Take a look at our Copilot for Microsoft 365 service and let's talk.
