I'd love a technical PowerPoint course. I find writing to be pretty straightforward. But when manager is like "can you create a couple slides about...." total deer in the headlights.
https://www.amazon.com/Presentation-Patterns-Techniques-Craf...
You can find it on the internet at various price points.
I even had a chance to give a technical presentation in front of the author and he said it was excellent, so apparently I internalized it’s lessons.
"torn" in this context means to be not decided between a couple of opinions or decisions.
https://inf.ethz.ch/personal/markusp/teaching/guides/guide-p...
He has a list of useful books at the end (I haven't read any of them, though)
I'm just like that. But I received wisdom from a friend that helped me a lot. The following "three" rules:
RULE 1. No bullet lists
RULE 2. No bullet lists
RULE 3. At least one meaningful image per slide, covering more than 50% of its surface
Then, you explain your subject like you would to a friend in a bar, keeping the slides as useful side material.
The thing with most of the presentation books out there like Presentation Zen is that they're really oriented towards a good presenter up on a keynote stage at an event using slides as a supporting element of a well-rehearsed presentation.
That's not your typical presentation--and certainly not your typical internal monthly status meeting or project update.
Presentation Patterns also seems to do a better job than most at acknowledging the realities of material that's both presented and needs a leave behind. The "standard" advice is that you should have two separate documents but that's really not practical in a lot of circumstances.
I found the video "How To Speak by Patrick Winston" delivered to new MIT students to be very helpful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY
Careful - once you become attuned to pp failures you will have little tolerance for them from both other people and yourself, and good presentations are a lot of work!