Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Following the suggestion of several friends, I take a look at Prezi – a new(er) presentation-making application.

Several friends hit me recently with, “prezi prezi prezi.” First, I didn’t understand what they were saying. Second, I didn’t know how to spell what they were saying. I can’t mimick their pronunciation in my blog, so forget that. It took a while of Google searching to learn how to spell it.

Go to prezi.com for the application. For free for 30 days, you can try it. Since I am associated with George Mason University, I can use a version of the program free forever (or something like that).

Prezi is an alternative to PowerPoint, Keynote, and the like. Some claim that it is a vastly superior alternative. You build a presentation like in PowerPoint, but you don’t build a linear set of slides. Instead, you build everything on one big piece of paper. Your presentation, i.e., what happens when you hit the “next” button, jumps around the big sheet of paper and zooms in and out.

The zooming in and out is the heart of the presentation. It can be dizzying if you zoom in and out too much, but if you do it well you will have a nice presentation. Your prezi will get a lot of attention – at least until the product is successful and then people will be accustomed to it and not think anything of it.

That is the situation prezi finds itself. Success will kill their product as it won’t be novel. Plus, if it really succeeds, Microsoft will put an army of programmers on the job and allow PowerPoint users to do the same thing.

At least for now, prezi offers a different way to create a presentation that will garner more attention than the usual PowerPoint. Here is an example Prezi on youtube.