The title of this blog is a bit dramatic and I don’t think Power Point is going away anytime soon. But then, Prezi “appears” to be an alternative. But why “appears” to be an alternative? Because I haven’t seen it used by anyone till early this week when my colleague showed me a presentation “NYC : Is it Sustainable”. The interesting part, he explained, was that the slide deck was made in Prezi, which is a cloud based application and has a free version. The Prezi presentation about NYC is given below.
I had forgotten about Prezi after that, but was reminded of it again by an article in the July edition of the Toastmasters International magazine. In the article, the author Christine Clapp, DTM quotes Angelie Agarwal, the founder and head trainer at Learn Prezi (learnprezi.com), who recommends Prezi for people who are craving a change and want to do presentations in a drastically different way from what is possible with PowerPoint or Keynote, the PowerPoint-like software offered by Apple. According to the Prezi website, the cloud-based presentation software has a “zoomable canvas [that] makes it fun to explore ideas and the connections between them.” Christina Hoyer, a Copenhagen-based presentation-skills trainer and the cofounder of Imprezzing (imprezzing.com), points out that zooming makes Prezi special. She explains, “Prezi is fun to work with and you can make beautiful designs with a few simple text elements and basic images,” she says. “Prezi encourages you to do things in a simple and elegant way, but not necessarily a linear way.”
Prezi has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. The author lists the following.
Advantages
- Showing ideas, connections and the big picture
- Easy integration of images and video
- More creativity and flexibility
- Compatible across computers
Disadvantages
- Difficult to manipulate initially
- Zooming can be disorienting
- Not easy to make handouts
- Subscription required for private presentations
Curious to know more about Prezi? Click here and start “Prezi-ying”