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Reading images from powerpoint slides and returning results

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Posted on by TD-03111215-0

Hi Team,
We have a SharePoint site that hosts numerous PowerPoint slides, each featuring images of plots, graphs and tables. Recently, we received a request to leverage AI to search through these images and return all references to specific keywords or details, including other slides that contain tables or text.
We developed an agent using Copilot Studio and referenced the SharePoint library as knowledge. While the search functionality does return some results, it does not capture all of them. Additionally, for the images it does return, the results aren't always accurate regarding the slide number or the image itself.
If anyone has successfully achieved this or has any ideas on how we can improve the accuracy and comprehensiveness of our search results, your insights would be greatly appreciated. We are particularly interested in solutions that enhance the identification of images and ensure the proper referencing of slide numbers. I am attaching sample file for reference.
Thank you in advance for your assistance and suggestions.

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Presentation1.pptx

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Giraldoj 757 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Reading images from powerpoint slides and returning results

The issue is mainly that Copilot builds a very basic index when you connect SharePoint. It only reads the text that’s actually stored in the files. So if your PowerPoints are mostly images with text inside them, Copilot basically can’t “see” that — it doesn’t OCR the images during the SharePoint indexing step.

If you need accurate answers from those slides, your best option si to use Azure AI Search to index the SharePoint library properly.

Azure AI Search does a better job because it builds a richer index:

It runs OCR and pulls text out of images and screenshots.

It breaks down PowerPoints slide-by-slide instead of treating the file as one blob.

It adds AI enrichment (entities, key phrases, semantics) so you can search by meaning, not just keywords.

So with AI Search, Copilot gets a much clearer and more detailed picture of what's actually in the presentation, instead of just “some PPT with no readable text.”

Docs if you want to dig deeper:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/search-how-to-index-sharepoint-online

Hope it helps!

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TD-03111215-0 13 on at

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Reading images from powerpoint slides and returning results

Thank you very much for providing suggestions and link for how to achieve this. We will give a try to this and hopefully it will do the magic. It does seems like search index is in public preview, any other alternative approach to achieve this?

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