The title of this CNN article is "$500K homes now selling for $200,000" but a more accurate title would be "$200K home once sold for $500K." As the realtor in the article says, "the properties were wildly overpriced." http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/04/02/foreclosure.dream.homes/index.html?...

Here are a few tips I've thought up for giving presentations. Some of these tips are generic, some are specific to PowerPoint. Feel free to add to this via comments or just steal the whole list and do something else with it - as long as someone spreads the word. The general theme here is that you are (presumably) giving a presentation for a reason and you want to only do things that promote that. Anything else that happens will distract your audience from your message.

Turn off you screen background Background photos are distracting. Don't distract people from your presentation.

Clean up your desktop icons Put all those files and links on your desktop in another folder. Don't distract people from your presentation.

Turn off Outlook If Outlook is set to pop up a preview of new emails as they arrive turn it off. You don't want to share those with the room, especially if you don't have a good spam filter.

Turn off IM IM pop-ups are very distracting. Turn the whole thing off.

Use Firefox profiles This is a great tip, too bad I'm hiding it in the middle of the list. Look up "Firefox profiles" and use them. Basically you create a business-only profile and when you have to use the internet around other people they won't see anything else in you drop-down history, form fields, etc. Anything not related to the presentation is distracting, but anything not related to the people in the room can be embarrassing - personal web browsing, competing companies, etc. Monster.com is the worst thing to have in your history short of porn.

Turn off your sound I don't think I have ever seen a PowerPoint presentation that benefited from sounds, neither PowerPoint sounds nor miscellaneous Windows sounds.

If you have to have sound use external speakers If you must include a video or have a legitimate need for sounds do not use the built-in speakers in your notebook. You need big speakers to get the sound to everyone. And hopefully you can place them so that most of the room has a reasonable sound level, not too loud or too quiet.

Learn to use the keyboard for PowerPoint navigation Most people can figure out to click the left mouse button to advance the slides. You can also use the right arrow or the N (as in NEXT) key. The problem is going back - how many people know you can use the left arrow or the P (as in PREVIOUS) to go back a slide? This tip alone could save thousands of hours of lost time each year.

Use silent signals If you have someone else controlling the keyboard work out a silent gesture for advancing slides. Hearing someone say "Next Slide" every thirty seconds is distracting. If you want to pretend you have a wireless mouse or a clicker that would probably work just fine.

Learn how to setup your screen If you want to use your notebook screen for notes and have the presentation screen show only the presentation try "Set Up Show" from the "Slide Show" menu and look at the "Multiple Monitors" option. Occasionally it will end up backwards so that your notes are on the big screen and your presentation is in front of you.

Check your spelling Most office applications underline misspelled words with a little red line. Ignore this at your own peril.

Don't Animate or use transitions Much like sounds, I have never seen a presentation that benefited from having titles sliding in from the side. And when the screens get flip-flopped and you have to give the show from the slide-creation view the transitions don't work anyway.

PowerPoint does slides, not presentations The presentation is the act of sharing information with the people in front of you. PowerPoint gives you a slide show - just a tool to help convey your information. If you think of the PowerPoint file as the presentation you're getting off track.

Slides are not Speaker Notes Please don't fill the slides with text and then read it all to the audience. The slide show should reinforce what you are saying, not the other way around. If you don't have value to add by standing up front and speaking then skip the whole thing and send out an email instead. This one is so important there are probably entire college course on it somewhere.

Have a Backup Plan Things go wrong all the time, so you should have some idea of what is recoverable and what is not. If something doesn't work and your "presentation" is the information you are sharing you can still share it without a computer. If your "presentation" is a PowerPoint file you'll have to cancel it if technology is not cooperating.