Want to never have to sit through a grueling PowerPoint presentation again?
Then read this article and forward it to everyone in your office. Now.
I was skeptical, too. I mean, seriously, how could you possible improve on PowerPoint? There is a reason it has barely changed in more than 20 years, and it has to be because it is the most effective way to make a presentation, right?
Perhaps it was, up until last year, when Prezi launched.
Prezi is a web-based platform for building presentations. But instead of creating linear slides, you create a zoomable map of ideas, words, images and even video. As you progress through the presentation, the screen zooms in and out and pans to where you direct it to go.
Think of it as a huge poster on which you can post anything you want to, in essence creating an interactive flow chart.
It took me about 20 minutes to go through the tutorial, which is a Prezi presentation itself that explains how to create one. After going through the tutorial, you can start your free account, which allows you to start making your own presentations. The free membership gives you 100 megabytes of storage. With the free account, your presentations are public and displayed on the site — so be sure not to include any confidential information in your presentation if you decide to try it out.
Making my first Prezi, which I’ll show you later, only took up 3 percent of my storage, so you can get a lot of out of a free account, although if you plan to use video, storage may become an issue.
If you want the ability to make your presentations private, the site cost is $59 a year but comes with 500 megabytes of storage. For $159, you can download an offline copy of Prezi and use 2,000 megabytes of storage.
Before attempting to create my own Prezi, I searched the site to see if any there were any from Richmond, but I couldn’t find any. So I checked out some of the most popular Prezis. The presentations can be embedded on web pages, which is another awesome feature. Below is an example of a basic Prezi:
The presentations can also be shared via Facebook, Twitter and email.
I decided to make a presentation about our coverage of the Circuit City bankruptcy over the past year.
Within a few minutes I was placing and organizing text. It is easy to upload your own images and incorporate them into the presentation. In order to resize, rotate or move text, images and other elements, you have to use a tool called the Transformation Zebra.
It took me a few minutes to figure how to use the ridiculously named tool, but once you get the hang of it, creating your presentation is a snap.
There are some limitations, however. Prezi has eight templates to choose from (two of them are for Chinese characters), each with three fonts. While the ability to choose any font would be helpful, it’s a minor complaint since everything else you can do with Prezi blows PowerPoint out of the water.
After organizing your presentation, you create a path through which to navigate the map of ideas you created. All you do is click each element in the order you want it to appear, and when you play the show it automatically pans and zooms its way through.
It took me just over two hours to finish my presentation on Circuit City:
Prezi is very easy to learn, and it is fun to use. The kinetic movement of the presentation may seem a little gimmicky to some, but I think it is a gimmick that works. I would much rather sit through a Prezi than a PowerPoint, but not just because the pans and zooms are good at capturing the attention of even the most ADD-afflicted member of the office. The ability to organize information in a way that isn’t one slide after another in chronological order is Prezi’s best aspect.
Below is another popular Prezi that is a great example of what you can do with the platform given enough practice:
Al Harris is a BizSense reporter. Please send news tips to Al@richmondbizsense.com.
Thanks for this review. It’s exciting to think I’ve sat through my last powerpoint!!! OK, that may be a bit naive, but Prezi looks fantastic!
With the demos shown, I am already tired of the pan-out, pan-in motion of Prezi. I hope the product has some other tricks.
Cool concept. Needs some work but it will probably get the attention of Microsoft and force them into modifying and improving Power Point if they don’t just buy Prezi.
Looks good for simpler presentations. But this has nothing on the tools and control found in Apple’s Keynote software.
Amazing Circuit City presentation! That was good. Made me laugh.
I’ve been using Prezi for about a month now. I have the free version, though I am considering upgrading to the $59 subscription.
I enjoy the non-linear approach and the ability for me to go off the beaten path as needed. The movement is dramatic and has a certain wow factor, though I suspect over time people will be as bored by this as by PP slides. Mostly I like how the program forces me to think in concepts rather than lists, since lists don’t carry over well. I’m also tending to use words and short phrases with pictures instead of details, which is improving my presentation techniques.
I have converted a couple of my PP presentations, and it has been productive for me to rethink the ideas as I package them in a different form. It embeds very easily on to my web site, and the downloaded version runs just as smoothly as the online version.
Many of my quibbles probably will be resolved over time. I wish I could bold or italicize text; likewise I wish I could more easily create different text blocks that are the same fort point (text size is adjustable, but there are no font point values. I wish I could copy elements from one part of the presentation to another or from one presentation into another.
Whether this is a PowerPoint slayer is unclear to me. I fall in to the same question found in many discussions of Prezi: is it better, or just different? I may not know this for a while. If I find myself moving back to PP, I’ll have my answer. But for now I am still enthusiastic.
I used Prezi’s free version for a while but got sick and tired of their standard templates that make all Prezis look alike. Via http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/StoryTools I found a great alternative toPrezi http://www.ahead.com. Same zooming concept but Ahead gives you much more control of your layouts and if you’re used to Adobe you’ll get it pretty quickly.
amazing new breakthrough…
I have never been a fan of Powerpoint…..Prezi is another thing altogether…
Cheers…!!
Thanks for the review on Prezi. Also, thanks to Will Wolf for mentioning ahead.com. Will be exploring both.