If I had my way, all PowerPoint presentations would be banned as a crime against humanity, but that's not going to happen any time soon. When you are obliged to sit through one, there's nothing worse than an endless sequence of bullet points which the speaker then repeats without elaborating or developing. Microsoft's Office Hours columnist Shellie Tucker offers up a guide to designing presentations that don't rely on an endless sequence of bullet points, making better use of PowerPoint's other design features. Much of it is obvious (keep to a single point on each slide so you have to explain to the audience rather than dictate, for instance), but it's worth referring to next time you have to build a deck. For more PowerPoint strategies, check out our guide to avoiding PowerPoint snags. [Office Hours: PowerPoint without bullets via Inside Office Online]

By default, PowerPoint uses its 'snap to grid' feature to make sure objects line up neatly. That's great for beginners, but irritating if you want to move items more precisely for a particular effect. It seems obvious that you should be able to turn this behaviour off, but in the allegedly more intuitive Ribbon interface, you could waste a lot of time looking.
A post on the official PowerPoint blog admits as much: "It's never been really easy to find, but it only got harder in Office 2007." More practically, it also details how to temporarily move items independently of the grid, as well as how to switch it off snap-to-grid permanently in both Office 2003 and 2007. Microsoft has promised to make this more obvious in a future release, but at least this helps fix the problem if you encounter it.
Quick Try This: Smooth sailing [The PowerPoint Team Blog]

Marketing whiz Seth Godin is right when he says that the thank yous dished out at the beginnings of conferences, large meetings, and other confabs are usually inelegant, rushed, and ineffective, boring the listeners and not really crediting the helpers. His suggested fix is to take or grab pictures of those you want to thank, and put on a looping slideshow ten minutes before the gabbing starts:

Put each photo on its own slide, preferably with a well designed ID below it (it should be on a black box, with a nice sans serif font reversed out. Like you see on cable TV news) ... String one after the other. Build a dissolve transition between each one. Program it to put up a new slide every two seconds—don't go too slow!—and to loop the presentation.

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Windows only: Freeware PowerPoint plug-in iSpring converts your PowerPoint presentation to an interactive Flash video with the click of a button. Not only is iSpring a great way to make your PowerPoint presentation more portable (not everyone has PowerPoint, after all), but as Digital Inspiration points out, an exported movie even preserves all of your slide transitions, animations, and hyperlinks. iSpring is freeware, Windows only, works with PowerPoint 2000 through 2007. Alternately, you can upload any presentation directly to the SlideBoom web site (which appears to convert and host Flash movies made with iSpring) if you don't want to host the presentation yourself.

All platforms: The IT designers at iPresentee offer a package of 100 attractive icons and objects for download and use in your slideshows and documents. The iPresentee Keynote objects are resizable TIF images with transparent backgrounds for use in your Keynote or PowerPoint slideshow, Word document, brochure, or any creative project. The package is a free download and includes common icons like flags, stars, speech bubbles, road signs, and computer symbols like folders and hard drives.

Next time you need to give a presentation from afar, fire up Zoho Show, invite a few attendees, and give the presentation in real-time with Zoho Show's Remote feature. You invite participants, and as soon as everyone shows up and you start the remote presentation, what they see matches exactly what you're doing. You advance a slide, their browser advances a slide. Even if you don't plan on using Zoho Show to deliver the final product, it could still come in handy to review and collaborate remotely on PowerPoint presentations (which Zoho Show imports seamlessly).

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Windows only: Freeware screencasting application Community Clips records screencasts of your Office software in action. Developed by Microsoft, Community Clips integrates with the quick access toolbars of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint so you can quickly record a quick demonstration or an audio/video version of a PowerPoint presentation with one click. We've featured several screencasting applications in the past, but Community Clips' Office integration makes it perfect for anyone needing to do a quick demonstration in your Office app of choice. Community Clips is freeware, Windows only.

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Want to share a presentation with friends, co-workers, or the web at large without worrying about who does or doesn't have PowerPoint installed? authorStream, a free presentation sharing site, offers the same kind of embed-anywhere utility as previously-posted SlideShare, but also provides options to download presentations as MP4 video files, putting slideshows with or without audio one step away from YouTube, iPods, DVDs, or whatever format comes in handy. To work as video, presentations must have either recorded narration or rehearsed timings added in PowerPoint, which the Digital Inspiration blog explains in detail at the via link below.

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Google Documents has added something that may not have a lot of flash, but it's probably the most-demanded feature since its Presentations tool launched—a plain ol' "Export to PPT" feature. That's a nice relief to a lot of cross-office compatibility problems, but a more quiet addition of saved searches is what's really new and helpful. Choose key words, document types, date ranges, authorship, or whatever else you're regularly looking for, and get those files quickly from the sidebar. Nifty.

Here are some tips from cognitive science for improving the impact of your Powerpoint presentations. Harvard cognitive scientist Stephen M. Kosslyn has applied his research on how our brains process images into some tips for making presentations more memorable.
The hokily-named Goldilocks Rule, the Rudolph Rule, the Rule of Four, and the Birds of a Feather Rule are explained in detail on the IO9 blog post, so hop over there for the full rundown. They are basically tips on how to minimise the amount of data you show to get the point across, and how to use the brain's capacity for noticing changes and difference to be able to call attention to the important things in your presentation.

How Cognitive Science Can Improve your PowerPoint Presentations [IO9]