Good advice and some great links. There is a program within SAP to send our entire group of speakers to presentation school. The point is not to provide them with better powerpoint skills. (God knows we need ‘em too, have you ever seen SAP presentations? Some of the slides damn near have every single pixel populated). The purpose of presentation school is to improve the communication skills, not the powerpoint skills, in other words, be better presenters even if the material is boring or poorly prepared. Presentations start with the person presenting, there is no better example of this than Dick Hardt. Dick could take a handful of slides that have no more than 3 words each and weave a story that captivates the room.

“the genesis of painfully dull presentations predates the computer.”