Tech Tips & Tales from The MS Office Maestro

Your weekly guided mini lesson on Microsoft, Copilot & smart working

🌴 This Week: Sunshine, Storms… and PowerPoint

I’m writing to you from Florida this week, surrounded by grandchildren, bursts of sunshine… and some truly torrential rain.

It seems to switch in minutes, one moment blue skies, the next a full-on downpour. Very dramatic, and a good reminder that not everything goes to plan.

Sleep hasn’t quite adjusted yet (3am wake-ups are still a thing) but there’s something quite lovely about early coffee in a quiet house before the day begins.

In between family time and dodging the rain, I delivered Session 3 of Microsoft 365 with Copilot – The Human Advantage.

This week’s focus was PowerPoint with Copilot: Designing Impactful Presentations.

💻 What Made the Difference

We began with the foundations:

• Slide Masters
• Themes
• Templates

Because before Copilot can help you, PowerPoint needs structure.

Once that groundwork was in place, we explored how Copilot can:

• Build a presentation from a document
• Reshape and refine slides
• Support clarity and flow across a deck

And one message stayed front and centre:

👉 Copilot supports the process but you stay in control.

At the end of the session, I asked for a usefulness rating.

10 out of 10.

Which says a lot about what people actually need right now, not just access to AI but the skills to use it well.

🚀 Cohort 5 is Now Open (September)

If this is something you want to get confident with, the waiting list for Cohort 5 is now open.

📅 Dates: 8, 15, 22, 29 September
🕙 Time: 10:00 to 12:00 EST (3:00 to 5:00 PM GMT)

This is the full programme where we build skills step by step across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, with Copilot running through everything.

👉 Join the waiting list: Cohort 5 - Microsoft 365 Copilot and The Human Advantage​

🔄 From Foundation to First Draft

This idea of starting with structure before design came up again and again in the session.

And it leads perfectly into this week’s Copilot Moment.

✨ This week's Copilot Moment

Brief → slide outline (PowerPoint)

You know when you’ve got a short brief and someone says, “Can we turn this into slides?” — but staring at a blank PowerPoint feels like more work than it should be? This is a really simple way to get started without overthinking it.

Instead of building slides straight away, ask Copilot to help you shape the structure first.

Try this in Copilot:

Role: Acting as my presentation assistant
​Goal: Create a slide outline from the brief below
​Context: Audience = team or client; keep the wording concise and action-focused
​Steps: Propose slide titles with three supporting bullets per slide
​Expectations: Output text only (titles + bullets), not full slides

Why this helps at work:

You get instant structure, a clear starting point, and something you can quickly sanity‑check with stakeholders before spending time on design.

Quick Win

Paste a short brief into Copilot, generate the outline, then copy it straight into PowerPoint as your first draft.

📌 A tiny Microsoft tip

Reset Slide in PowerPoint

If a slide suddenly looks “off” after pasting content or making edits, the Reset button can quietly fix a lot of layout issues.

It reapplies the slide’s original layout without removing your content.

Where to find it:
In PowerPoint, go to the Home tab and click Reset.

Why this helps: ​
It snaps text and placeholders back into alignment, saving you time fiddling with spacing and formatting.

Try this today: ​
Open a slide that looks slightly misaligned and click Reset — just to see the difference.

💛 Before I go...

This week has been a mix of jet lag, laughter with the grandchildren, sunshine and some impressively dramatic Florida downpours.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, a group of professionals had a real lightbulb moment with PowerPoint and Copilot.

That combination of strong foundations, clear structure and human judgement really does change the outcome.

Back next week with more from this side of the Atlantic ☀️

✍️ Shelley Fishel

The MS Office Maestro​
Expert-led, human-centered Microsoft 365 training