Microsoft 365 Copilot Overtakes Claude in PowerPoint Slide Understanding

Microsoft 365 Copilot's default behavior with PowerPoint slide decks has now leapfrogged Claude's.

Up until recently, Claude was rather good at working with visual information versus Microsoft 365 Copilot and ChatGPT. They tended to convert everything to text and then work from there, whereas Claude tended to work on visuals (though it could not accept PPTX files, only PDF versions of them).

Now, this has flipped. By default, using Agent Skills, Claude will process a PPTX to markdown and then analyze from there, losing anything contained in graphics. By comparison Microsoft 365 Copilot, both in Copilot Chat, and in PowerPoint, will seamlessly answer questions about slides based both on what is shown as well as what is written.

You can get Claude to return to its visual-first behavior by prompting it to do so. But this is an interesting case where Microsoft is using its home-field advantage to work with the Microsoft 365 data layer logically to deliver the result most users would expect first time.

First posted on Linkedin on 01/30/2026 -> View Linkedin Post Here