PowerPoint presenters can fit into two categories - those who create and those who don't. If, like many people, you've sat through tens or hundreds of presentations, you're going to know that many of them are achingly similar (and subsequently, equally boring).

Creating a bespoke presentation is the answer.
There's always the person who goes overboard with whizz, bangs, colour, flashes and noise on their presentation - that's not what improving PowerPoint is about, in fact, it will only distract your audience. What you need to do is make the presentation interesting enough to be engaging, but using creative tools to enhance, rather than detract from what you're saying. Here are three ways to do it:

1. Draw your own shapes and diagrams

If the content of your presentation calls for a certain graph, diagram or shape, you can always draw your own. Many people get too stuck on the Art that comes with the PowerPoint package and end up using something that was the best they could find, rather than what truly suits the presentation. If you've got a little more time to prepare your presentation, then doing your own drawings and shapes can be a great addition. Plus, of course, nobody will have seen them before.

2. Make it interactive

Many people consider PowerPoint as just text on a slide - sometimes with pictures, but that's usually the limit of any kind of interesting feature. You could have interactive footers and headers, and there's also the option to have speaker notes, too - so that the attention is diverted back to you during the presentation. As you will already know, if someone simply reads what's on the slide, the audience get bored easily as they can see what you're about to say in front of them.

Interactivity will help to keep your audience interested and alert - you could go as far as embedding video, for example, meaning you don't have to switch to fiddling with the projector at the other end of the room. The more interactivity, the more interesting the presentation will be for your audience. Put them first, and you'll reap the benefits.

3. Use slides from other presentations

Many people are unaware that PowerPoint will allow you to import or export slides to and from other presentations. If you're giving a talk on how the company has performed in relation to last year, then you can always import the slide from last year's presentation with the end of year totals, instead of having to do it all again. Or, for example, someone made a better point than you concerning an element of the business, why not use their slide? (with permission, of course).

Too many of us think of PowerPoint in terms of doing it all "from scratch", and this can be daunting and sometimes, time wasting. If you use all the tools available to you, you can make your presentation interactive, interesting, unique, and above all - make YOU look good. After all, isn't that the best outcome we can all hope for in a presentation?