Microsoft PowerPoint is a terrific medium because it allows you to reinforce your message with visual prompts. But too often, the power of PowerPoint is lost because the speaker doesn't use it to help viewers focus on the message. Instead, PowerPoint itself becomes the focus. If you want to feel more relaxed and confident the next time you're using PowerPoint to deliver a presentation, try these four tips to maintain the focus on your topic—not the medium. 1. Make consistent style changes on all slides using the slide master If you're tired of changing things like bullet styles and indentations on every slide in your presentation— listen up. PowerPoint will do this for you! You only have to make the changes you want once—to the slide master. The slide master stores information about the theme and slide layouts of a presentation, including the background, color, fonts, effects, placeholder sizes, and positioning. I use this feature in every presentation I cr...