Here are some of the top tips for communicating effectively using PowerPoint. A lot of people do not like PowerPoint and they trash talk about it.
The truth is that PowerPoint is a tool like any other tool. It is like television and like a lot of television, it can be a very effective medium if you follow a few basic steps.
The main objective for you should be to focus on one Idea per slide and to not use a lot of text on it. If you have a whole bunch of text, complicated columns, charts and numbers, and undecipherable graphs, simply put them in a PDF file or any other document and email it out to your audience or you can hand it out as leaflets. What you should not do is project it when you are speaking.
Remember that your PowerPoint presentation is a helping tool- you should not be looking at the text written on the presentation as your speech. You still need to figure out in advance what is it that you want your audience to do and know. Figure out no more than 5 ideas which are going to motivate your audience to do what you want them to do.
If you start preparing your PowerPoint presentation by just creating a bunch of slides, gathering a lot of data, and putting in a bunch of bullet points, then you are guaranteed failure. The slides are for your audience, not for you to read off of. If you begin to use your PowerPoint as your own teleprompter, you will fail miserably. Simply use a sheet of paper if you feel the need to have notes with you as you speak.