Copilot in PowerPoint (Microsoft 365)

Microsoft’s Copilot acts as a personal assistant in PowerPoint that uses generative AI to draft outlines, suggest designs, create visuals, rewrite slides and keep your deck on brand. It also generates speaker notes, summarizes or expands key points, translates slides and exports presentations to other formats. While it keeps everything nicely inside your branded environment, there is still a lot to be desired from the output in terms of slide design.

Canva Magic Studio

Canva Magic Studio is a suite of AI tools for creating presentations, images and videos from simple prompts. It includes Magic Write for text, Magic Edit/Eraser, Magic Media for text‑to‑image and video, and Magic Design for full decks, with features like background removal and animation available even on the free plan.

Gamma

Gamma is an AI design platform that turns prompts, outlines or imported content into polished presentations, websites or documents. It offers smart layouts, translations, AI‑generated images, real‑time collaboration and easy export to PowerPoint, Google Slides, PDF or web formats.

NotebookLM

NotebookLM by Google is an AI research assistant that analyzes uploaded PDFs, web pages, videos, audio files, Docs or Slides and summarizes them into clear insights. It can create polished presentation outlines from your sources, supports long conversations with a huge context window and protects your data from training use.

Midjourney

Midjourney is a text‑to‑image generator that produces photorealistic or artistic visuals from short prompts using a diffusion model. Initially run through Discord, it now also offers a web interface and operates on a subscription basis.

Freepik AI Suite

Freepik’s AI Suite includes an image generator that creates visuals from prompts or reference images, with options for speed or detail and style matching. The platform integrates tools to edit images, remove objects, change aspect ratios, access an API for automation and choose among multiple generative models for photorealistic or quick edits.

Eleven Labs

Eleven Labs offers AI voice‑generation models with expressive speech, voice cloning and dubbing in many languages. Additional tools include voice isolation for cleaning recordings, an AI music generator and an API that supports several text‑to‑speech models.

Sora 2

Sora 2 is a generative video model from OpenAI that simulates realistic physics and produces videos ranging from photorealistic to anime. It supports audio synchronization, cameo insertion, watermarked output and parental controls for safe use.

Other top AI tools to explore

Beyond the mainstream options above, several emerging tools can help automate presentation creation and multimedia design:

remove.bg – An AI‑powered tool that automatically removes backgrounds from photos, finishing the job in about five seconds for single images or bulk batches, saving users from tedious manual editing. They also have an add-in for PowerPoint.

vectorizer.ai – Quickly converts low-resolution logos, icons, and other bitmap images into clean, scalable vector graphics. You can even get it as a PowerPoint add-in through BrightCarbon, so you can fix fuzzy graphics and tidy up visuals without ever leaving your slides.

Runway Gen‑2 – a multimodal generative model that can create videos from text prompts, images or existing footage. It’s useful for transforming still images or mock‑ups into cinematic videos or backgrounds.

Synthesia – an AI video platform that turns scripts into studio‑quality videos with realistic avatars and voices in many languages. It drastically reduces production time and eliminates the need for cameras or actors.

HeyGen, D-ID and similar avatar tools – These tools animate photos or avatars to produce talking‑head videos by synchronizing lip movements with speech. They enable you to create narrative videos without filming real presenters.

Lumen5 and Pictory – AI‑powered video editors that convert blog posts or articles into engaging short videos with automatic scripts, visuals and voiceovers. They simplify social‑media and marketing content creation.

Plus AI / SlidesAI – add‑ins for PowerPoint and Google Slides that turn outlines or notes into polished slides. They provide writing assistance and design suggestions directly within your presentation tool.

AI tools we haven’t fully tested yet

While we haven’t had time to experiment with the following tools, they show promise and are worth exploring:

Pitch AI – Pitch’s AI presentation maker creates on‑brand decks by matching your brand tone, rewriting text, building charts and editing images. It offers AI proofreading, tone adjustment and collaboration tools to keep decks consistent across teams.

Beautiful.ai – Generates entire presentations from a brief description and uses smart templates with AI to write and illustrate slides. It can also summarize or expand text, translate content and adapt to documents or web pages you upload.

Tome – A web‑native storytelling tool that provides an intuitive canvas for building multimedia presentations using AI‑generated text and visuals. You can start from a prompt or template and refine your narrative with interactive content.

Storydoc – Transforms static slides into interactive scroll‑based presentations with AI‑assisted writing and design. It adds dynamic variables, interactive data visualizations and engagement analytics for personalized and engaging content.

Decktopus AI – Decktopus automatically generates polished, branded slide decks from a topic by outlining, writing text, suggesting visuals and layouts and ensuring brand consistency. It aims to provide a one‑click, end‑to‑end presentation generator with dynamic visuals and designs.

Designs.ai – An all-in-one creative suite that uses AI to help you quickly produce logos, videos, social posts, and other branded content from just a few prompts. It is a handy companion when you need fast, on-brand visuals to drop into your decks without hiring a designer or starting from a blank slide.

Uizard – An AI powered design tool that turns simple text prompts, sketches, or screenshots into editable UI mockups for apps and websites in minutes. It is great for rapidly prototyping interfaces you can then screenshot or export and drop straight into your slides as polished visuals.

These tools represent the rapidly evolving landscape of AI‑powered presentation design and multimedia creation. Depending on your needs—whether it’s drafting slides, generating images or videos, or creating interactive documents—you can explore these options to streamline your workflow and elevate your presentations.

Our favorite sources of free, high-quality, and unique (no more same old shaking hands images, please!) photos that belong to the public domain (licensed CC0), meaning they are copyright-free and attribution-free:

Pixabay – Awesome site for 100% free and Creative Commons CC0 licensed images, illustrations, vectors, and videos.

Pexels – We love this site. It’s a compilation of 100% copyright-free images from around the web. They also have a section of their site dedicated to videos. Note: They have a super-handy free unofficial add-in for PowerPoint and Word add-in that you can download and install here.

Unsplash – Typically these are photos of landscapes and cityscapes, but it often features conceptual images and photos of patterns or textures (great for backgrounds).

TinEye – If you ever need to find the source of an image you’re using that you found online but can’t remember where (don’t infringe on copyrights!)…simply upload your image and it will search the web for the original source. You can also download a plugin that does the magic directly within your browser. 

And for an insanely comprehensive list of free stock photo sites (with pros & cons), check out The 27 Best Free Stock Photo Sites.

By far the easiest way to get new & unique graphics onto your slides (especially now that ClipArt is gone) is to use a service like Build-a-Graphic. They are custom-built graphics designed for PowerPoint. All you need to do is download and insert them onto your slide and then tweak them like you would SmartArt.

Although this is a paid service, we’ve found that we’ve reused these graphics again and again, so we see it as a good investment in sharper looking slides.

If you want free PowerPoint graphics, you can check out these websites too:

Freepik – Great database with tons of very high-quality and modern icons, flat icons, vectors, and PSD files to use. Freepik does require you to give them credit if you use their material, but they make it very easy with a simple html code.

Pixabay – Awesome site for 100% free and Creative Commons CC0 licensed images, illustrations, vectors, and videos.

Our favorite sources of free icons and vectors. Please note that some of these require attribution, so please use them appropriately:

Icon Speed Challenge – Learn how to create vector icons from any icon font! Plus download our Nuts & Bolts Jackpot Resource, with 886 free icon set + the Icon Cutter Tool.

Vector Magic – Creates a vector out of any image. WE LOVE THIS TOOL!

iconmonstr – Simple icons & easy to use interface (you can even pick the color of your icon before you download it).

IcoMoon – Crisp and simple icons available for free download and use in many filetypes (SVG, PNG, and iconfont).

Freepik – Great database with tons of very high-quality and modern icons, flat icons, vectors, and PSD files to use. Freepik does require you to give them credit if you use their material, but they make it very easy with a simple html code.

Pixabay – Awesome site for 100% free and Creative Commons CC0 licensed images, illustrations, vectors, and videos.

flaticon – A large database of simple icons available for in many filetypes (iconfont, PNG, SVG, EPS and PSD).

FindIcons – A large database of thousands of icons and vectors. A standard search will almost always point you to paid sites like Shutterstock, but there are options on the left that will allow you to filter by license, and thereby find some free ones. Most are available in various filetypes.

Zondicons – Free SVG icon list created by Steve Schoger, that is regularly updated and just plain awesome.

If you have Office 365, you can now insert SVG (vector) images directly onto slides in PowerPoint, and edit them like regular shapes.

If you’re looking to add some pizazz to a live presentation, check out these sites for truly free multimedia:

Pixabay – Awesome site for 100% free and Creative Commons CC0 licensed images, illustrations, vectors, and videos.

Pexels Videos – Great resource for gorgeous professional looking 100% copyright videos. Has a helpful search feature and category organization.

Mazwai – Beautiful copyright-free videos that are easy to download.

Mixkit – A new (feb. 2019) site with entirely free HD stock video footage for your work – all of it commercially licensed

And if you use a lot of video and motion backgrounds, check out the paid parent version of the sites above, Storyblocks Video.

Everything you need to know about Office safe fonts, as well as custom fonts and how to embed them.

YouTube tutorial: What are the best fonts for PowerPoint, and which fonts you should avoid

100FreeFonts (please check the licensing for each font to make sure you can use it)

Free Fonts on Urban Fonts (please check the licensing for each font to make sure you can use it)

DaFont (please check the licensing for each font to make sure you can use it)

Article: “The Best 100 Free Fonts”

Ultimate Guide to Cloud Fonts by Julie Terberg

This awesome post by Johanna Rehnvall details the 44 safe fonts and how they look.

This other awesome post by Johanna Rehnvall details 74 safe font combinations and how they look together.

This PPTFAQ article by Steve Rindsberg goes into super-depth into embedding custom fonts.

This Office Blog post explains simply how to embed fonts in PPT 2010 and 2007, as well a handy feature for replacing fonts.

This “Inspired by Design” webinar, hosted by PowerPoint MVPs Julie Terberg and Nolan Haims, explains why you should never embed fonts.

MyScriptFont will turn your own handwriting into a font, like every other font installed on your computer.

Fonts In Use shares insights about font trends based on what fonts and font combinations are being used in the world of graphic design (including logos) today.

Finding the right colors for your slides is more an art than a science. So here are some places that make choosing the right PowerPoint color palette easier:

Adobe Color CC – A free tool that can help you generate color pairings and variations on your current colors.

Color Lisa – This site has compiled color palettes from the world’s greatest artists. Use these as inspirations for your templates.

Canva Colors –  Their Design Wiki on colors teaches you everything you need to know about colors and their meanings, and offers matching color combinations to inspire your next design.

Material Design Color Palette – This awesome site will create a beautiful color palette based on the combination of any colors.

Pantone’s color of the year – Each year, Pantone chooses a new color and color palette based on design trends.

WARNING: Most pre-built PowerPoint templates you find online are not real PowerPoint templates. Instead, they are what we call ‘fake templates.’

If you are not sure whether your PowerPoint template is real or now, see our guide here.

That being said, if you want to look through examples of pre-built slides to save yourself time or get inspiration, you can see the 3 sites we recommend for finding Professional PowerPoint templates here

SlideCow [Affiliate] is a design agency that creates the highest quality PowerPoint templates we’ve seen on the web, bar none. The founder, Yoyo, produces affordable templates that are gorgeous, fully editable, easy to use, and are based on an well-designed Slide Master. This means that you can use any template he creates seamlessly with other presentations. In particular, check out his latest creation, the Reem Template.

Envato Elements [Affiliate] is a large platform where designers can upload and sell their presentation templates. Many of them include hundreds of slides, as well as custom icons you can use. The popular PowerPoint templates are typically modern, stylish and trendy. Their simple $29/month fee gives you access to unlimited downloads.

TemplateMonster [Affiliate] is a large platform where designers can share their presentation templates, some of which are quite nice. Most of them include hundreds of slides, as well as custom icons you can use. You can buy individual templates for around $20.

Slides Carnival (free) offers professional designs that cover all styles from playful and creative to formal and business presentations. You’ll find that all templates are completely customizable and easy-to-edit, even though most of them aren’t real PowerPoint templates.

Canva (partly free) is a site that provides a huge variety of design templates, including presentation templates. Do keep in mind that none of these are built in PowerPoint – they’re built using the Canva software – so you’ll need to export the design as images and paste them into PowerPoint (rendering them un-editable).

Nolan Haims’ “The Better Deck Deck”: This deck of cards gives you 52 proven design alternatives to the dreaded bullet point layout and over 150 professionally designed examples of slides using these techniques to spark your creativity and improve your next presentation.

Note: PowerPoint templates are different from PowerPoint themes. To learn all about PowerPoint themes, see our guide here.

Typically, a PowerPoint background is simply a solid color, a pattern, or an image, which you can create on your own.

However, if you want a pre-built one, here are some places to get free PowerPoint backgrounds:

Presentation Magazine – These are by far the best pre-built PowerPoint backgrounds you’ll find on the web, with modern, stylish, and simple options to choose from.

Free PPT Backgrounds – As its name suggests, this site offers a wide variety of decent free PowerPoint backgrounds for download.

Hero Patterns – Another free creation by Steve Schoger, this site allows you to fully customize the colors and opacity of his custom-made patterns and use them in your presentations, under the Creative Commons license.

Subtle Patterns – A source of, you guessed it!, subtle patterns, that you can use for backgrounds in your slides. Please not that their Creative Commons license requires attribution and share alike.

The Pattern Library – An amazing bank of super cool patterns, created for fun by designers.

To learn more about this, check out our article on PowerPoint backgrounds here.

Have a command you use all the time, or a task you wish could be automated? Well chances are you’re not the only one, and that some of the Microsoft MVPs have gone and coded a solution for you! Check out some of our favorite free PPT add-ins:

BrightSlide by BrightCarbon – An incredibly feature-rich and robust add-in that helps you create, polish, and edit presentations at speed. It draws on industry-standard shortcuts to boost your workflow and provides amazing, extra functionality PowerPoint users have only dreamed of. It’s the ULTIMATE productivity add-in to tackle many of the pitfalls of PowerPoint.

Build-a-Graphic by BillionDollarGraphics [Affiliate] – This easy-to-use software automatically recommends the best graphics to represent keywords and keyphrases. It includes thousands of professional, 100% editable PowerPoint graphics including infographics, icons, isometric graphics, puzzles, gears and much more.

SlideWise by NeuxPower – Let’s admit it, PowerPoint can be a labyrinth of features, and even seasoned experts may not grasp every nuance. So, how can you shine in the presentation arena? From Fonts to Images to Colors, Slidewise unveils every aspect of your presentation, allowing you to swiftly identify and resolve any issues. Some of our favorite features are the ones that identify hidden fonts or extra large images lurking in your deck. Once you find them, you can remove or adjust them.

Pexels by OfficeConsult – Allows you to seamlessly search for and insert great-looking and free stock photos from Pexels directly within PowerPoint.

Office Timeline – A timeline maker and Gantt‑chart creator that works as both a PowerPoint add‑in and a web‑based tool, helping you build professional project timelines quickly. It integrates with Excel, Smartsheet, Jira and other tools so you can import your plan data and generate polished visuals in minutes.

iSlide – A very comprehensive add-in that allows you to do many awesome things, including make uniform irregular fonts, paragraphs, colors, layouts and styles; use 4000+ well-designed vector diagrams automatically; use their own libraries with over 100, 400 diagrams, images and icons; combine images and slides; and more!

Neo/Ipsum by Justin Bretschneider – Makes it easy to populate PowerPoint placeholders with dummy text (Lorem Ipsum and other more ‘real life’ type text) for graphics, slides, or template mockups to clients. Fill the entire deck, the current slide, or a specific slide. The add-in even works in Word and Excel.

Social Media Canvas by BrightCarbon – A free PowerPoint add‑in that turns PowerPoint into a social‑media design tool, giving you preset or custom canvas sizes for platforms like LinkedIn, TikTok and Instagram. You can design posts directly in PowerPoint and export them as perfectly sized images or videos.

Talk Time by YOUpresent – Helps you manage and plan the timing of your delivery when you are physically present with your audience. This is a major upgrade to PowerPoint’s built-in Rehearse Timings feature.

PPT PowerTools – A comprehensive PowerPoint productivity add‑in with over 140 tools for faster slide creation and a slide library.

remove.bg – An add-in that connects to an AI background removing tool.

Although your slides should speak for themselves, sometimes you just need an extra little ‘je ne sais quoi’. These technologies will help you deliver a better presentation, and get your audience more engaged:

Glisser – This cool new start-up offers a presentation tool that allows you to integrate social interaction (like lide-by-slide ‘like’ voting, live audience questions, comments and Tweets) into your presentations to help keep your audience engaged, and then generates data that helps you make your presentations better.

PollEverywhere – This polling software lets your audience vote on their own mobile device –  computers, tablets, phones (through both texting and web) – anything. There are many brands of such polling software out there (and a new one seems to come out each day), but this is our favorite one as it integrates seamlessly into PowerPoint.

If you work in a big corporation or work with other people on hundreds of slides, it can be quite challenging to keep organized and make sure that all your digital assets are kept up-to-date. Here are some amazing services that will solve those problems in one go!

Templafy – Updated your logo and need that change to be reflected across your entire company’s “About Us” slides in thousands of presentations? No problem! With Templafy, you can manage your digital assets so they stay up-to-date across all of your corporate documents (what a relief!).

SlideSource – Ever have to manage 10,000+ slides for a SINGLE presentation and all of their iterations? I used to do this using a system of folders and naming conventions, but with SlideSource, the days of creating nested folders and V1, V2, V3…V78 are over!

TeamSlide – Helps your team find and manage all of your PowerPoint slides and resources (no small feat), giving you effortless access to the PowerPoint content your team needs to be productive.

Here are some awesome tools we use:

NXPowerLite by NeuxPower – The ultimate file compressor tool. Fast, effective, and full of helpful features. Compress PDF, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, JPEG, PNG & TIFF files with this desktop app and PowerPoint add-in. We love the ability to create custom settings profiles and quickly select them from the home screen for a great productivity boost. And also the batch feature, which allows you to compress up to 10,000 files at a time.

iSpring Free – This free software will convert your PowerPoint presentation into a Flash or HTML5 file, while keeping all the animations, transitions, and hyperlinks. Great for training and educational decks.

Plot Digitizer – Ever receive a slide with a chart that was not actually a chart… but a picture of a chart? And maybe it was missing data labels? So how do you recreate this chart natively in PPT or Excel? Well this free piece of software allows you to do just that to 99.99% accuracy.