How to Present Powerpoint Presentations

I know that you are nervous about your presentation and desire to do well. The only thing that you need to keep in your mind is to get the presentation done in a format that makes things easier for you to flow with the subject you are presenting. One of the scariest forms of presenting is by PowerPoint. The ironic thing about this form of presenting is that PowerPoint presentations are the easiest to present. The reason is because you are just organizing slides that coincide with your presentation. The real reason why anyone would be nervous is because of the presentation itself; not the PowerPoint.
Presenting a PowerPoint presentation is not the most excruciating thing in the world. In fact all you have to do is read what is on the board and allow the slides to do the entertaining, since you can add animations and other forms of entertainment on the slides. All you have to do is present the information on the slides and make sure that you elaborate on what is being presented. This is pretty much all you have to do when it comes to using the PowerPoint. It's not really rocket science. It's just a matter of you taking your time.
Depending on what type of computer that you are using, you will need to make sure that you give yourself some time before the presentation to get the necessary tools that you will need in order to make the meeting a successful one.

Differences Count When You Are Presenting

OK, so you've got a big presentation coming up and you know that you want to make a difference and have the audience walk away with a good understanding of the complex info that you are going to present. What can you do to really make sure that you key points get hammered home?
Setting yourself on fire halfway through the presentation or using trained animals both would be great, if impractical ways to accomplish this. How about two simpler ways that us technical folks always seem to forget as we pull together our presentations?
Audience Attention is drawn to LARGE differences that are perceptible.
Let's say that you've got a slide that contains one of the key points that you want to make to your audience. There is probably other things on that slide (like a title?). You need to make sure that your key point, be it a number, a comparison, a figure, etc. jumps out at your audience. Background images, scrolling text, clipart, video clips, etc. are all swell; however, if they distract from your key point then they need to go away. Keep in mind that PowerPoint's ability to have items join the slide via animation might be a good way to lead up to and introduce the key point.
People group elements into units automatically, which they then remember
The human mind is an amazing thing. We can quickly take in large quantities of information and rapidly make decisions about it. You can make this talent work for or against you in a technical presentation. Things that you place close to each other on a slide will automatically be considered to be related by your audience. A good example of this is labels and the thing that they are labeling. A bad example of this would be a graph that shows that both the price of copper ore and the price of apples have both increased by 25% in the past 6 moths. Both items would be shown closely together on the same graph and the audience would associate them. However, they really have nothing to do with each other (unless you are trying to talk about the cost of copper apples...).