MPUG Editorial · September 7, 2026 · ~5 min read · Category: AI & Copilot

Copilot in PowerPoint Live can now explain your slides to the people watching them. In the Microsoft 365 Copilot release notes dated August 25, 2026, Microsoft shipped a feature that lets attendees in a PowerPoint Live meeting select text on a slide and ask Copilot what it means, with the answer returned in the side pane. If you present project status decks for a living, this quietly changes the shape of your Q&A.

What actually changed

According to the Microsoft 365 Copilot release notes, the feature is described as “Explain slide selection during PowerPoint Live with Microsoft 365 Copilot,” tracked as roadmap ID 557256 and listed for Windows. Microsoft’s own summary of the change is short and specific:

• Attendees in a PowerPoint Live meeting can select text on a slide and ask Copilot for an explanation.
• Previously, slide content in PowerPoint Live was static and non-interactive for attendees.
• Copilot returns the explanation in the side pane, alongside the live presentation.
• Microsoft states the feature works within Microsoft 365 PowerPoint Live sessions and that content is processed within the meeting environment.

Two things are worth underlining. First, this is an attendee capability, not a presenter one – the person consuming the deck gets the assistance. Second, it is scoped to PowerPoint Live, the Teams sharing mode that renders your deck as slides rather than as a screen-share video. If your team habitually shares its screen instead of using PowerPoint Live, none of this applies to you.

Why it matters for project managers

A large share of any project review is spent explaining the artifact rather than discussing the decision. Someone asks what “SPI” on the earned-value slide is measuring. Someone else wants the definition behind an amber RAG status. A new stakeholder does not know which of the four workstream abbreviations is theirs. Each of those questions is legitimate, each is cheap to answer, and each one costs you the room’s attention.

Letting attendees resolve those questions themselves, in a side pane, without interrupting, moves that traffic off the critical path of your meeting. The value is not that Copilot is smart; it is that the interruption never happens. Reviews that currently run long because the first fifteen minutes are definitional can get those minutes back for the decisions you actually convened the meeting to make.

There is a corresponding discipline, though. Copilot explains what is on the slide – it does not know your project’s history, your governance conventions, or why the schedule baseline was rebaselined in March. A generated explanation of an ambiguous label is an explanation of an ambiguous label. If your decks lean on internal shorthand, attendees may now get a confident, plausible, and subtly wrong reading of them. The fix is the same discipline good project communication always asked for: label your artifacts so they survive being read without you in the room.

How this fits the wider Copilot-in-meetings picture

This is one item in a run of Copilot changes aimed at the meeting itself rather than the documents around it. The same August 25 release notes also brought Teams meetings and Outlook emails into Copilot Notebooks as grounding sources, and added Copilot-driven scheduling to classic Outlook for Windows. Taken together, the pattern is Microsoft pushing Copilot into the moments where project information is actually exchanged – the meeting, the invite, the follow-up – rather than only into authoring.

For PMs standardising on the Microsoft stack, that makes meeting hygiene a Copilot dependency. A deck with clear slide text, a meeting run in PowerPoint Live rather than screen-share, and a transcript that Copilot can reference are now inputs to a working AI workflow, not just good practice. Our Microsoft Teams training and Microsoft Project training tracks both cover that groundwork, and MPUG’s master classes go deeper on running governance meetings that hold up under scrutiny.

What to do next

• Check whether your organisation has Microsoft 365 Copilot licences and whether the feature has reached your tenant – Microsoft rolls Copilot features out gradually to a subset of users before expanding, so absence today is not absence permanently.
• Switch your next status review from screen-share to PowerPoint Live in Teams, so the deck renders as slides and attendees can select text at all.
• Audit one recurring deck for unexplained shorthand. Anything an attendee could misread, a language model can also misread – expand it.
• Note the platform limit: the release notes list this for Windows. Do not promise it to a stakeholder joining from a Mac or a phone.
• Log the PDUs. Keeping current on delivery tooling counts toward Ways of Working; record it in your PDU tracker.

Frequently asked questions

Does the presenter have to enable anything for attendees to use this? Microsoft’s release note does not describe a presenter-side toggle; it describes the capability as available to attendees in Microsoft 365 PowerPoint Live sessions. Licensing and tenant rollout state will determine what any given attendee actually sees, so verify against your own tenant rather than assuming.

Is my slide content sent outside the meeting? Microsoft states the feature “maintains data security by processing content within the meeting environment.” For anything governed by a specific compliance obligation, confirm the details with your Microsoft 365 administrator against current Microsoft 365 Copilot documentation rather than relying on a release-note summary.

Does this work if I share my screen instead of using PowerPoint Live? No. The feature is scoped to PowerPoint Live, which renders your deck as slides. A screen-share sends video frames, and there is no selectable text for an attendee to act on.

The bottom line

This is a small feature with a specific payoff: it takes definitional questions out of your review and answers them somewhere they cost nobody’s attention. It rewards PMs whose decks are legible on their own terms and punishes those whose slides only make sense with narration. Switch a recurring review to PowerPoint Live, then read your own deck as a newcomer would – that exercise is worth more than the feature.

Source: Release Notes for Microsoft 365 Copilot – Microsoft Learn, August 25, 2026. Copilot features roll out gradually and availability depends on licence and platform; verify licensing and tenant specifics against the primary source and your own administrator before relying on this in a governance meeting.