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.
I am a bit torn apart reading into it and watching a presentation by him. I think it might work well in some cultures and with some speakers. Being at a university seeing a lot of technical presentation by students I think he is quite heavy on presentations, which I typically always suggest to use really carefully my students and inexperienced speakers.
Presentation Patterns, which a couple of people have mentioned, is probably more practical than most in terms of giving bite-sized advice though a lot of it is overkill (and not really even appropriate) for giving a manager a couple of slides about something.
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.
Myabe your anxiety is because you're focusing on the "make some slides" vs. "deliver content in a presentation format". If you adhere to guidance for the later the slides are actually pretty easy. You quickly release they are just a prop that supplements the entire production.
I found the video "How To Speak by Patrick Winston" delivered to new MIT students to be very helpful:
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!
Both, really. Maybe one driven by the other. I think of what I want to say, try to find a template, no template quite matches, pick one reasonably close, get bogged down by colors of arrows and things not snapping right, wonder if what I'm trying to say is no good or else there would be a good template already, start over in Visio, same process back to powerpoint.
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.