Powerpoint colour format..

Brown

blues and whites / grey normally look good for colours to use to stop it looking crap, probably a good idea to set up a decent master first and last slide before anything else.

Best to keep it bright if he is using a projector with "Only" bullet points (white background with some blue / green text, and some simple background image set in the master slide).
Never put too much detail into a powerpoint as the listeners will lose interest.

Stick to a simple slide deisgn and keep it professional looking. Blues and whites do look good.

This is the colour scheme my employer uses for all its powerpoints..

http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/19/197211/Presentations/12298[1].pdf

nothing worse than a fancy powerpoint presentation, as said before keep it simple.

last presentation i seen was from guy who was likeable and funny but i couldn't help but be put off by him because he was putting us through this elaborate presentation. masses of figures and charts and pie charts and performance charts and,,,,, u get the idea.

colours will not make a presentation stand out, they will help but its the speaker who should have yer attention. better to get yer dad to stand and do his talk then note down points which can be emphasized by powerpoint, and of course topic headings etc for reminders as he's going.

personally i hate standing in front of people and talking , and 25 mins is a loooong time for this, but better that than 25 mins of someone showing you reems graphs and "reading" of a presentation.

just my 2p worth. hope he gets on well.

I usually use a plain darkish blue background (you can add a slight diagonal fill effect if you like), with yellow text for slide titles and white for main text. This gives the best clarity, IMHO. Adding the Shadow feature to the text makes it stand out a bit more, particularly if you have a good projector. As others have said, keep the amount of text on each slide to a minimum and make sure the font size is big enough!

Good luck.