For some of us, the fear of presenting can cause real anxiety. Indeed, it's such a serious problem that a virtual reality medical centre in California offers stressed executives presenting practice sessions for the equivalent of £70 an hour. After subjects don a virtual reality headset, they can experience standing in a virtual room with a computerised audience. As the speakers run through their presentation, doctors measure heartbeat and skin temperature. They turn up the pressure as speakers become more comfortable. Mobiles ring and audience members are made to look bored: they begin whispering or even leave the room. Participants can even use their own presentation and put their PowerPoint slides directly into the virtual environment.

If you think this is a fuss about nothing, then it might be a surprise to learn that boring business meetings cost UK businesses £7.6bn a year; as many nervous presenters think that they can hide behind the technology by simply reading the bullet points, distancing themselves from the audience. It doesn't take long to be rumbled.

Microsoft's LiveMeeting is a hosted web conferencing service that lets people interact in a virtual "room" online. Presenters can run through their PowerPoint slides, use animated laser pointer and highlighter tools, and even allow people to take control of their desktop PC screens. There are presenters who hate the thought of walking into a room where there is a large audience, and running a PowerPoint presentation with LiveMeeting is different.

With PowerPoint 2010 your presentations are more portable than ever before. For example, the Save and Send feature lets you post a presentation on your organisation's SharePoint site or your personal SkyDrive, where you can share it by sending a link instead of an email attachment. People can view it on the web page, in PowerPoint Web App. And if you need to make a quick fix, you can do that too, by editing it in the browser.

With the Microsoft PowerPoint Web App, you can embed presentations on websites or blogs so that anyone can view your information even if they don't have PowerPoint installed. Embedded PowerPoint presentations are great to get the word out in a visual, informative, and elegant way. You can share presentation slides from meetings or conferences, provide easy-to-follow instructions to your customers, or share favourite photographs for family and friends.

And if you want to run a live broadcast of your PowerPoint presentation, then check out Presentation Broadcast and invite people to the broadcast, by simply selecting Invite Audience. Your email client (such as Microsoft Outlook) will start up and an email message with information about the presentation appears. You simply need to do one of the following: if you have Outlook, use it to set up a meeting request as you do for other meetings; if you don't have Outlook, enter the broadcast date and time in the message. The shared folder location of the broadcast site is included in the message body automatically.

If you want to schedule a live broadcast for a later time, in your PowerPoint document, in the Slide Show menu, point to Online Broadcast, and then click Schedule a Live broadcast. On the Schedule Presentation Broadcast dialog box, in the Description field, type the information that you want displayed on the lobby page for the broadcast. Now click Settings, then on the Presenter tab, under File location, type the file location in the Save broadcast files in field. If necessary, under Audio/Video, change audio or video settings. Use this download to record presentations for playback and to record a presentation during delivery in person or to a remote audience.

And if you are using Microsoft PowerPoint Web App, SharePoint Online, SharePoint Online, you can display a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation on your web page, such as your blog or SharePoint wiki page. The presentation is stored in a public location in Windows Live SkyDrive, where you can copy an HTML to paste into the HTML of your blog or wiki page. That way, people can see the presentation without having to go to the SkyDrive folder. They advance through the slides one at a time. Updates to the presentation on SkyDrive are automatically reflected on the page where the presentation is embedded. So now there's no excuse for getting the jitters - with PowerPoint as your trusted program, you find it easy to show your professional side.