Prezi - Presentations With Zoom

I think most of us are familiar with Powerpoint, or Powerpoint-style presentations. But there is an interesting alternative if you want your presentation to look just that little bit different.

It's called Prezi

The idea of Prezi is to make the presentation of information more interesting. Powerpoint is very linear in its approach; you move across the screen from one slide to the next, with only the odd reveal effect to liven things up. Prezi, however, allows you to design your presentation like a large whiteboard or canvas. You place the objects in your presentation - pictures, videos, text and so on - on the board in a suitable arrangement, then create a path between them. This path doesn't have to be a straight line; you can move from one part of your canvas to any other part. Rather than slides you have 'frames' which surround parts of the canvas and define the limits of what is currently being shown on the screen. You can also zoom in and out of the canvas, which allows you to, say, embed the context of one frame inside another. For example a frame may show the title of a talk. The next frame zooms out of this and shows the title as being on the cover of a book being read by a person. The view could then zoom out showing the person sitting on a train opposite another person reading a book. And you then zoom in on the title of the book they are reading.

Rather than try and describe it any more, watch the official Prezi video, which shows you what a presentation can look like - towards the end you get to see how many of the key components are arranged on the canvas:



Prezi is a web-based application. That is, to run it you don't download any software to your computer but you design and create your work on their site. It is free to use, however in this case all presentations created are publicly viewable on the Prezi website. You can pay for an account, and this allows private storage. A premium account allows offline editing.

When you have finished your presentation you can download it to your computer. You don't need an internet connection to run it, but any computer you run it on must have Adobe Flash. The vast majority do, of course.

Of course, as with Powerpoint it is possible to create bad presentations. It's easy to overuse the zoom and rotate functions and, if done really badly, you can even induce nausea in members of your audience. Prezi has a more limited palate of fonts and colours compared to other presentation tools. In addition the different approach to creating presentations means that there is a small learning-curve to be overcome, as you switch from a linear slide-based approach to a more flexible layout. This can be partially overcome by pre-planning your presentation before even going to the Prezi website.

The Prezi style of doing things is probably not suitable for all kinds of talk, but it is a great tool to add to your  presentation arsenal.