Last October I saw a Prezi presentation by a colleague of mine. The material in the presentation was stellar, but it nearly took a back seat to the dazzling, engaging and, yes, spellbinding mechanics of Prezi. It is a new zoom-style presentation platform that makes PowerPoint look like a moped up against a Ferrari.
And it is free.
Like anything worthwhile, there is a learning curve that needs to be dealt with, but it is worth the time and trouble to learn it. Since December, every presentation I have done has been Prezi-based, and literally every person I have shared it with was eager to learn how to do his or her own.
It was developed by Adam Somlai-Fischer, a Hungarian architect, as a tool to help with visualization. But instead he has developed one of the more interesting storytelling devices yet created. It follows the speaker with a visual narrative of the material. True to the developer’s mission to “make sharing ideas more interesting,” this presentation tool does just that. What it does is give the user complete freedom to exploit the visual experience by using a zoom feature. The techies among you will recognize this as a Zooming User Interface, cloud-based SaaS, (Software as a Service) presentation delivery model.
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Nice article and as a presentation specialist myself I’ve been interested in Prezi but have found the learning curve a bit daunting. The other seeming lack is the capability to embed narration, that with PowerPoint allows for easy hosting on AuthorStream and conversion to YouTube. I agree that this is a cool tool for live presenters who can master, which I would still like to do, but it does still suffer from a lack of full features that allow for standalone automatic presentations with narrations. Am I wrong?
Garr Reynolds, author of “Presentation Zen” wonders if we’ve ever seen a great talk given with the help of Prezi. Not I. And I find that the Prezi presentations I’ve seen bound me up in the visuals and took my attention away from the presenter – who should be the center of attention. I’ll stick with Keynote in the simplified and limited way Reynolds and Nancy Duarte suggest it be used — as a tool to bring emphasis and memorability to the key points. I want my audiences to go away with more than an animated slide show.