At the heart of most tech-savvy presentations, in conference calls or in conference rooms, is a PowerPoint presentation. The reason for this is that the program is just that easy to use and powerful to boot. Just in case you've never used one – or seen one – a PowerPoint presentation can include pictures, videos, text, and graphs, all controlled and organized like your personal slideshow.

This is the basics of what you can do, and it's easy to combine these basics to produce an advanced presentation. For example, to show movement, use several slides instead of one. This is best illustrated using a graph. On slide one, put the graph with the "before" information on it. On slide two, put the "after" information. With one click, your graph's informational arrow shoots up the axis.

There are bad things you can do with a PowerPoint presentation. For your learning and enlightenment, look at the article, Death by PowerPoint by Mike Aoki. In it, he describes an interminable PowerPoint presentation and the unhappy reactions of his fellow participants around him. He didn't write the article to be mean to the presenter; he wrote it to help future presenters avoid the same mistakes.

The best advice for when you are creating your PowerPoint presentation is in the name itself. It's called "Power" and "Point." You use it as a tool to emphasize your main point and sub-points. You don't let it take over your presentation, or deliver your information by itself. That's your job, and besides, you do it so much better.