As 2025 comes to a close, we’ve been reminiscing here at TLC Creative Services about the people, places, and things that have made us smile throughout the year. And because we love our traditions, we decided to turn those smile-worthy moments into our annual Top 10 list!  

Things At TLC Creative That Made Us Smile

TLC Creative added Copilot Pro for the entire team. We’re loving the assistance with daily operational tasks, research, some image creation, building Excel formulas, and even travel assistance when we’re on-site. 

VXP Meeting developed more custom-coded modules in-house and boosted overall VXP performance. 5K virtual attendees? No problem! And the new website is beautiful and informative!

Across the TLC Creative design team, we travelled to 49 show site projects to work with some amazing clients in some great places! Cities with two or more shows this year were LA and San Diego (of course), Seattle, Orlando (yes, we said hi to Mickey!), Boston, and across the pond in Lisbon (other favorites were Maui, Mexico City, and Amsterdam). 

Things PowerPoint Did To Make Us Smile

We can now edit speaker notes text directly in Presenter View…while your presenter is on stage! And now we can discreetly type a message to a presenter, telling them they are out of time – or the CEO is going to join them on stage! 

Embedded videos work great – we’ve come so far from those dark times! Not only are videos a great design tool for content or subtle background motion, but they work so well now that when Playback Pro died on a show earlier this year, PowerPoint saved the day by running all videos embedded on slides (Microsoft – we need a “time remaining” countdown!). 

Add-ins continue to give us new cool features! Slidewise’s text box autofit settings allow us to instantly remove those pesky “shrink text” settings across all slides – totally geeky and so awesome! And the new Brandin PowerPoint add-in is becoming a huge new favorite for our staff…so much so that we’re sharing it with our clients. 

Things We Learned That Made Us Smile

Our own blog, The PowerPoint Blog, is our encyclopedia! We have lots of fun writing about things we’ve discovered or are learning in PowerPoint, but we also use it to look up things we forgot how to do but were documented on the Blog.  

AI can be your friend! Yes, we use Copilot to summarize emails in Outlook and compare deck versions to figure out what the client changed, but we are loving other AI tools like Photoshop Generative Fill + Nano Banana, which opens a whole new level of productivity and creativity in designing our clients’ presentations.  

Producing a podcast takes a lot of passion, and we’ve had so much fun hosting and inviting so many wonderful guests to talk shop. From presentation coolness, design, AI, teaching and training, discussing software tools and books, to career and business tips, we’ve talked about it all this year on The Presentation Podcast.

But, The #1 Thing That Made Us Smile This Year Is… 

We love what we do, and that makes us smile! We love the positive nature of the presentation community we live and work in. We value our clients who trust us with their brands and allow us to inject our creativity throughout their presentations and meetings. And we deeply appreciate our TLC Creative Services team – whether you’re in a supporting role, you design amazing things – including slides, of course! – or you join us for show site adventures. We love living this crazy presentation life with you! 

-Lori, Troy, and the team at TLC Creative 

AI tools like Microsoft Copilot are making many everyday workflows faster and smarter. And as a result, the TLC Creative design team has been putting Microsoft 365 Copilot to the test!

This time, we wanted to test a common presentation design task we often have: to see if Copilot can streamline the process of converting an image of a table into an editable PowerPoint table.

Note: We at TLC Creative Services are using the paid Microsoft M365 Copilot subscription, vs. the free Windows M365 Copilot. With the paid subscription Copilot is available within PowerPoint, but for this post, all of the Copilot prompting was done in the M365 Copilot app, not from Copilot inside PowerPoint. 

Goal 

We started with a simple goal: turn this image of a simple data table into a usable, editable table on a PowerPoint slide.

Our Process 

• Open M365 Copilot. 

• With the paid version of Copilot, the options of “Work” or “Web” are available. We opted to keep the information internal to our organization and used the “Work” option. 

• We used this prompt: “Please recreate this table as an editable PowerPoint table and insert it into a PowerPoint slide.”   

Note that we included 2 phrases we felt were important in order to get a workable result: “editable PowerPoint” and “insert into a PowerPoint slide.” 

• Then we clicked the “+” icon and the ADD CONTENT option to give Copilot our image of the table.

• We then uploaded the image of the data table from our computer.

• Next, we clicked the process button to complete the upload.

 Copilot then analyzed the image and provided a downloadable PowerPoint file.

Opening the slide Copilot gave us, it is great to see that the table Copilot generated wasn’t just an image. It is a fully functional table with editable data in each cell! Here is the slide and PowerPoint table – and yes, Copilot gave us a 4×3 aspect ratio slide (weird!).

As expected, we discovered that the prompt verbiage can make a big difference. Testing some alternate prompts didn’t yield editable tables and simply produced an image of the original image, but said image was placed on a slide. And with one prompt, Copilot simply inserted the original image onto a slide – not helpful. But as summed up by one of our design team members, “It was kind of difficult to get Copilot to fail. It almost always produced a slide with an editable table.” And this is a good thing to hear! 

Using our same test table image, here are a few prompts that did fail, along with the results: 

1. “Make a slide from this.” Copilot created a chart using the data and gave a summary – no PPT slide produced.

2. “Insert this image as a table.” Copilot created a table, but it was within Copilot itself – no slide produced. The text was able to be copied/pasted, and Copilot did ask if I wanted the table in a specific format, which included PowerPoint.

3. “Create a layout like this one.” Same result as #2 – a table and summary of the table were created in Copilot.

While Copilot won’t always interpret things perfectly, with the right prompt, it can be very helpful in converting a data image into real, editable content, saving a lot of manual effort. It’s simply all about how you phrase your prompt! 

-The TLC Creative Design Team 

Last year, the TLC Creative Services team put together a very (if we may brag) cute “AI” inspired Christmas card to send out to friends and colleagues. 

View the 2024 post here, which also has a collage of TLC Creative holiday cards over the years.

What fun do you think we’ll include in this year’s card? Just a couple more weeks until we reveal! 

And enjoy this video from 2023. Troy and Lori always enjoy a lovely Christmas lights display at their home, and we’re all too happy to revisit!