General help

Can moodle make a course, meaning something like a powerpoint presentation for the student to learn, then have a quiz after.  

Certainly. You can create a course and add the Powerpoint presentation to a topic in that course, as e.g. an External URL activity. But a Powerpoint presentation is not a course... You could take that content out of the Powerpoint presentation and put it into a topic in that course. That would give you a lot more control over the presentation of that information.

Moodle has a Quiz activity which you can then add to the course as a conditional activity - in other words, your students can only attempt the quiz once they have viewed the activity containing your Powerpoint presentation.

If you want to issue a certificate that's simple to do. Install the Certificate module and then add the Certificate to your course and make it conditional on the student having completed the Powerpoint and Quiz activities. Then the certificate will only be available to the students once they complete the Powerpoint and Quiz activities.

I have gone into sample courses and there are 50 items, links, modules or whatever, it just seems so involved and not what I need.   need learn, test, report.

Moodle is very powerful so it can be a little bit intimidating for a new user. But you don't have to use all the different activity types. Just choose what you need and go with that. You don't need to make your course very complicated. You can experiment with all the other activity types as you get more familiar with Moodle. Start small and you'll be ok...

Following up from what Luis said, you might want to have a look at the Book and Lesson features.  Lesson can be a bit clunky, but it could offer you some more flexibility.

another option (though it costs) might be to look at Camtasia.  It has a free trial and the paid version id much cheaper than your current solution!  Camtasia has the option to embed questions in presentations and the PowerPoint import function is pretty good.  It can do a ton of other things, and also has a SCORM export function.

It really doesn't look like you should have much trouble finding a solution, (though change always includes a workload!). You just need to find what suits your processes best.

I'm sure the community here will help you!

Good Luck!