Are you spending more time formatting a presentation than actually writing it? Font sizes do not match from one slide to the next, the SmartArt graphic looks like it is straight out of an older Office package and you cannot find a suitable visual for the bullet points on slide 14. This is exactly where Microsoft has been working on PowerPoint since this summer. The Design tab has been reorganised, 13 new themes have been added, SmartArt has gained more modern layouts and at the same time Copilot takes over a large part of the tedious formatting work. In this article I show you how to use these changes in practice, from the new Design tab through to the Copilot skills that let you check and polish a finished presentation in a few minutes.
Step 1: Discover the new Design tab and themes
Open any presentation, whether in the desktop app or in the browser through powerpoint.cloud.microsoft and switch to the Design tab at the top of the ribbon. Microsoft has completely reorganised this area. Colours, fonts, effects, background styles and layout are now where you actually need them most often, instead of being scattered across several submenus. Right next to it sit 13 new themes available in the Design tab of PowerPoint for Windows and Mac, ranging from minimal and professional to playful and suited to training materials. A number of older themes have been retired from the visible gallery because hardly anyone was using them. If you are still working on an existing deck with one of those older themes, you can still find it through the Backstage view in the File menu, so it is not gone for good. 🎨 For a new presentation, try out two or three of the new themes before committing to one. The visual difference from the previous default look is obvious at first glance and your slides immediately feel less like an off-the-shelf template.
Step 2: Use the new SmartArt layouts
Select a bullet list or a block of text and insert a graphic through Insert, SmartArt. The new SmartArt layouts have been fully rolled out since July 2026 and cover exactly the situations where the old layouts caused the most friction. For timeline graphics, structured lists and so-called Meet the Team slides, you now get modern templates that let you drop in several images at once, for example team photos for an introduction slide. The handling has also been smoothed out. Placeholders that have not been filled in yet now show clearly recognisable hint text, so it is obvious at a glance which field still needs content. That helps especially when several people are working on the same presentation. Try converting a plain bullet list into a Structured List SmartArt layout and compare directly how much easier the slide is to read afterwards. For many standard slides such as project status, timelines or team introductions, this saves you the detour through extra tools or hand-drawn boxes.
Step 3: Standardise formatting with Copilot in one go
Instead of reformatting every slide by hand, use «Edit with Copilot» directly in the open deck. Open the Copilot pane and ask it to standardise the font, font size and bullet style across every slide. Copilot then works through each slide and applies the formatting consistently, without you clicking through them one by one. This is especially useful for presentations put together from several sources, for example when you combine a colleague's slides with your own new ones and the two sets previously looked different. You can also give Copilot instructions in plain language, for example asking it to switch a slide to a different layout, add an extra slide or restructure whole sections, without clicking through every single slide yourself. 💬 For particularly large decks I often switch models for this step, more on that in my article on choosing a Copilot model.
Step 4: Use the Copilot skills «Review this presentation» and «Visualize this slide»
Before you send a presentation or deliver it, it is worth looking at two new Copilot skills. «Review this presentation» automatically works through your whole deck and gives you concrete slide-by-slide suggestions on structure, clarity and storytelling, for example when a slide is too text-heavy or a key message is missing. «Visualize this slide» steps in exactly where a single slide still looks like a wall of text and turns the content into a suitable visual, such as a chart or a SmartArt graphic. You call up both skills with a single click straight from the Copilot pane, without having to write a prompt of your own first. I now use «Review this presentation» routinely as the last step before every client meeting, much like a spell check, just for structure and storytelling instead of typos. Especially for presentations put together under time pressure, this reliably catches a slide that is still too crowded or a transition that is unclear, before it catches you out in the meeting itself.
Step 5: Resolve questions during the presentation with PowerPoint Live
Something has changed for your audience too. If you present through PowerPoint Live, attendees can select a term or section on the slide during your talk and ask Copilot about it directly, without interrupting you. An unfamiliar term or a complex point can be clarified in real time while you keep talking. This is particularly useful in larger groups with mixed levels of prior knowledge, for example when a meeting includes both subject experts and colleagues from outside the field. Turn on PowerPoint Live as usual through the sharing option when presenting in Teams. The Copilot feature for attendees then comes along automatically, provided it is enabled for your tenant. Nothing changes in your usual routine as the presenter, you just get fewer follow-up questions in chat during the presentation and more focused questions afterwards.
Step 6: Let Agent Mode create a first draft from your own material
For a genuine cold start, PowerPoint now also has Agent Mode. Instead of starting from a blank slide, you briefly describe your task to Copilot, for example a status presentation for an ongoing project and the agent uses Work IQ to independently put together a first draft, grounded in your own files, meetings and emails on the topic rather than generic text blocks. 🤖 The result is rarely the finished presentation, but it is a far better starting point than a blank slide, because the right facts and the right context from your everyday work have already been built in. Use Agent Mode mainly for recurring formats such as status updates or kickoff presentations, where the structure barely changes and only the content needs updating. From there you take over the fine tuning with the steps from this article, from picking the right theme through to the check with «Review this presentation».
My practical tip from consulting
Before you start a larger presentation with several contributors, settle on the theme you want first and only then have Copilot standardise the formatting. Done the other way round, Copilot ends up correcting font sizes and colours that a later theme change immediately overwrites again, which costs you unnecessary double work. On every new project, I settle the theme first, then hand out the raw slides to everyone contributing and only at the end, shortly before the meeting, do I let Copilot look over the whole deck. That way the order stays clear and you save yourself a second formatting pass.
Conclusion & CTA
The new Design tab, the 13 fresh themes and the modern SmartArt layouts mean presentations look less like an off-the-shelf template right from the start. The two Copilot skills «Review this presentation» and «Visualize this slide» then take over exactly the checking work that would otherwise have cost you time just before the meeting. You do not need to set any of this up separately, all the features described here are already available in PowerPoint as soon as the rollout reaches your tenant, whether you work through the desktop app or through microsoft365.com. Open your next presentation, try out a new theme and let Copilot take a look over it. Give it a go now.
