Last year, on my graduate training programme, I went on a Presentation Skills training course, and what is the one piece of information that I remember from those 5 days.... breathe lots, it will take away the bright red face and the strange high pitched voice that appears from nowhere.

So, yes, I am pretty terrified when I have to give a presentation. And I think this is actually a conditioned response because it doesn't matter if it is a tiny audience full of people I know!

But, anyway, technology can sometimes seem like one more thing to go wrong, and I am a huge advocate of using slides in the right way and including other materials to communicate detailed information.

Nonetheless, it does make me feel immensely more secure when I have 4 or 5 key slides prepared to guide me and visually aid me through the presentation. And in my own way of taking my mind off the inevitable, I always end up spending a long time on making my slides "look nice".  This means that it gets to very late in the evening/morning before and I panic trying to remember what I want to say.

But now that I'm using Beta 2, making the slides look great and professional is so easy, that I am going to have to find another way to procrastinate (or just get well prepared in advance :)). One of my favourite ways to spruce up my slides was making sure all the graphics and charts were perfected, and as Gill's post, this is now a piece of cake. And my second favourite - animations and slide transitions, in previous versions this could take ages, now, the "Animation" tab in PowerPoint lets you see slide transitions and graphic animations live on your document. So no longer do you have to chose what you want and go to preview it, it just happens right before your eyes as you scroll down the options.

So, now that I can be a lot more prepared, all I will have to worry about is one of those unavoidable disasters that have a habit of only happening in your most important presentation of the year/your life! Much like, one of our newsletter readers, who responded to our request for "Presentation Disasters" with a nightmare story about getting her heel glued to the floor in a job interview...

Readers of the newsletter can find out more about this and other readers' Presentation Disasters in an issue coming later this summer :)