Andrew Girvan

Never Sit Through A Powerpoint Again – The Power of Prezi

There comes a time where we are all asked to make presentations. For many, and I know I have been guilty of this in the past, it mainly tends to involve working out at incredibly short notice what you are going to say, scrawling it all down into something like a Word document and then copy and pasting the resultant spiel onto an obligatory Powerpoint as bullet points. Depending on how good you are at improvising, you then find yourself reading almost verbatim from the Powerpoint screen behind you, all but ignoring your audience and quickly skipping from slide to slide.

I’ve had to make a couple of important presentations recently: one in front of other management students telling them about the three month academic placement I was on working for Perfect Pitch in London, the other pitching ideas for a dissertation – my Management Research Paper – in front of classmates and academic supervisors. For both of the presentations I chose not to use Powerpoint and instead experimented with a web based alternative called Prezi.com

Prezi is a completely different way to look at giving a presentation. Instead of moving through a “deck” of slides, users are encouraged to think of the presentation as a virtual napkin for them to scribble on. Using the awesome path feature you can set a route, navigating your way around the napkin, zooming in and out, choosing to focus at different heights and different places. This gives the audience and entirely different experience and instead of resulting in the discreet slides Powerpoint encourages you to create, you instead find yourself navigating through the topic of your presentation.

The Prezi I have embedded below gives you a good idea of what I am trying to describe. The presentation was given by the Developer team at Myspace at the influential European digital conference Le Web and does a great job of demonstrating what Prezi can do. Spreading their message across a huge digital canvas the Prezi lets you zoom in and out along your predefined path, with graphics forming a huge part of the presentation. You can also freely navigate around the entire canvas, literally looking at the big picture.

Once you have created your Prezi you can download the entire thing as an Adobe Flash file, which should be opened without complaint on both PC and Macs. If there is a reliable internet connection you can log into the site and load it full screen from your browser, removing the hassle of emailing presentations or juggling pen drives. I have tried both methods of presentation so far and have absolutely no complaints.

My previous party trick with presentations was to control the clicker from my phone or Apple remote, this is not quite as simple as I would like at the moment as the flash controls needed to pad yourself around the virtual track aren’t set up quite the same way as Keynote or Powerpoint. That’s not to say it can’t be done and there are certainly tutorials which I will be putting into effect before having to give my next big presentation, my Contemporary Issues In Arts Management conference paper. More on that conference and the paper I am planning on delivering once I have my abstract approved, hopefully this week.

One of the best things about Prezi has to be the community of active and enthusiastic users pushing the product to continue to innovate and add features. Within the last fortnight the site added a number of new themes for presentations, improved the tools you use to write the presentations themselves and added a two level education licence to their pricing line up making it free for anyone with a .edu or .ac.uk to take advantage of the normally paid for features. Off line access to edit your content is still a paid for option under the Education Pro licence.

There are a few draw backs associated with Prezi’s web 2.0 business model. When I first signed up for the service, pre Education Licence, there was no way for free users to shield their presentations from public search. In creating such an open community the site feels less like  a place to create useful business presentations and more like a YouTube style repository for mediocre presentations. Presumably all of the high flying web 2.0 business men using Prezi for their presentations have paid the 60 bucks to lock their content down.

Very in keeping with the web 2.0 ethos of the place, however, are the sharing features which Prezi has baked in from the start. Joi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons, has licensed all of his presentation for public reuse. Continuing this the very reason I was able to share the Myspace presentation with you on the site is because of the embed feature for public Prezi presentations. This does have the advantage of making the content far easier to share than a traditional Powerpoint where you may have required a service such as SlideShare or Scribd to make your content available following a presentation.

To make your presentations private from public view, go over the 100MB basic storage space or remove the Prezi.com logo in the bottom left corner of the screen you are going to have to shell out $59.00 a year. For those going to experiment with the site for the first time the Freemium model is certainly one which lets you work out whether Prezi is for you. If you get paid to write presentations for work however, you may find yourself wondering what its suitable to write your tester presentation about, as it will be available for the world and his dog to search for, sift through and – depending on which buttons you have or haven’t ticked – embed in his own site. It is worth pointing out that Prezi is incredibly quick to learn, and that I was able to create a far prettier looking presentations within half an our of using Prezi than I have ever managed to get out of a Powerpoint, hard as I have tried.

It handles pictures very well, just make sure that you check the resolution etc you are putting into your presentations as if you start zooming in and out on a poor quality image you will quickly find yourself staring at giant pixels, made all the worse if you are presenting on a large screen. Prezi also has some nice tricks up its sleeves when it comes to other embeddable media, you can, for example drop YouTube videos straight into your presentation.

The end effect of showing your audience a Prezi rather than a traditional Powerpoint can be that you think more about the content you are going to present, arrange it in a more visual way than is possible using a deck of traditional slides, and that your audience is more engaged as a result. As someone who generally thinks and makes notes using spider diagrams and mind maps it very much seems to fit into my way of thinking. It is very easy to get great looking presentations out of Prezi with very little time needed to learn how everything works. Give those preparing to sit through yet another Powerpoint a treat the next time you need to present, go and give Prezi.com a try instead.

Photo credit: Thomas Hawk on Flickr
Prezi credit: Mike Jones and Monica Keller of Myspace at LeWeb 09 on Prezi