PowerPoint’s new interactive slides skill is more than a nicer diagram

PowerPoint’s new Create Interactive Slides skill does more than the name suggests. Ask Copilot for a slide explaining a process or comparing two options, and it can generate exactly that, a clean, full-slide visual. But the same skill has also been shown building genuinely clickable, branching content: choose-your-own-adventure style navigation, decision trees, and interactive quizzes, all inside a normal PowerPoint file.

This is available now on PowerPoint for Windows through the Frontier programme, with Mac rolling out and expected to complete by early September 2026. It’s a Frontier pre-release experience, meaning it may change before reaching general availability, and it’s available to PowerPoint for Windows and Mac users who have access to the capability, not all Copilot licence holders by default.

Using the skill, eligible users can generate full-slide visual experiences for explaining complex concepts, presenting timelines, comparing options, illustrating systems and relationships, and communicating data visually.

In practice, the skill goes further than static visuals: demonstrations of the feature show it building clickable navigation between slides, branching quizzes, and decision-tree style flows from a simple prompt or reference file, genuinely interactive presentations rather than just better-looking static ones.

The roadmap message describes this fairly modestly. What it can actually produce is worth understanding properly before deciding who should use it:

• This is closer to interactive content authoring than slide design. Branching navigation and clickable quizzes are a different category of output to a nicer chart or timeline, worth knowing before assuming this is just a visual polish feature.
• It’s Frontier-gated, not broadly available. Only users with access to the capability through the Frontier programme can use it currently, so this isn’t something every Copilot-licensed user will suddenly have.
• As a pre-release experience, the output and behaviour may change before general availability, worth treating anything built with it now as exploratory rather than a finished, permanent format.

• PowerPoint for Windows and Mac users with access to this capability through Frontier
• Presentation support, training and adoption teams, who Microsoft specifically recommends briefing
• Anyone building training, onboarding or client-facing content who could benefit from branching or interactive formats

No action is required before rollout, but this is worth exploring deliberately given what it can do:

1. Identify Frontier participants who can evaluate the capability properly, ideally someone who builds training or client-facing presentations regularly, since that’s where branching and interactive formats add the most value.
2. Brief presentation support, adoption and help desk teams, particularly so questions about “how did this slide do that” have a ready answer.
3. Update internal PowerPoint guidance if you maintain standardised presentation processes, since interactive, branching slides are a genuinely different format to account for.
4. Treat early output as exploratory, given this is a pre-release Frontier experience that may still change before general availability.

This update is based on Microsoft 365 Message Centre update MC1461152, published 24 August 2026. Rollout dates are provided by Microsoft and may change.