Copilot in PowerPoint: Explain vs. Review This Presentation

Copilot in PowerPoint now has two skills with nearly identical names that do very different jobs: Explain this presentation and Review this presentation. One helps you understand a deck someone else made. The other helps you improve a deck you made yourself.

If you train people on Copilot, expect questions about which is which. Here is a plain-English breakdown, based on Microsoft's Message Center announcements.

What "Explain this presentation" does

This skill is for the reader. It goes through the whole deck, including slides, charts, tables, and speaker notes, and gives you an impartial reading guide so you don't have to click through every slide to figure out what the deck is saying.

The guide covers:

• The main idea (the gist and the ask)
• Key takeaways
• Important numbers
• Relevant visuals
• Speaker notes
• Open questions

I'd pay the most attention to that last item. Open questions point you to what you may want to ask the presenter before the meeting, which makes this useful when you're handed a deck ten minutes before a call.

Sharpen Slide Titles with Copilot in PowerPoint

The Sharpen slide titles skill in PowerPoint Copilot rewrites vague, one-word slide titles as clear takeaways. Find the skill, use the @ mention shortcut, and review the before-and-after summary.

Menard on MicrosoftChris Menard

What "Review this presentation" does

This skill is for the author. Copilot analyzes your current deck and suggests improvements to narrative flow, organization, structure, clarity, and storytelling.

Two details matter for planning:

• It doesn't change your slides. Suggestions are for your review only, and nothing is applied automatically.
• It's already available. It requires no admin setup and respects existing Copilot access controls. It launched requiring the Anthropic model, and Microsoft's June update says it now supports GPT-5.5 as well.

Redesign Slides with Copilot's Visualize This Slide Skill in PowerPoint

Use the Visualize this slide skill in Copilot for PowerPoint to turn text-heavy slides into visual layouts. Three examples: bullets, a six-step process, and a timeline.

Menard on MicrosoftChris Menard

Explain vs. Review Table

Download a one-page PDF of Explain vs. Review

Create Interactive PowerPoint Slides with Copilot: 3 Practical Examples

The Create interactive slides skill in PowerPoint Copilot turns a table, an Excel workbook, or plain slide content into a clickable slide with filters, live totals, and swapping visuals — and it all works in normal editing view.

Menard on MicrosoftChris Menard