Presentation with Prezi - how to collect and present your ideas in a new way
Ralf Haller
January 25th, 2011
“Powerpoint sucks” is what you can hear for quite a while. And while this is partly true we all go back to it when we have to do a presentation, right? 
Well, recently the “PPT-is-no-fun community” got louder and came up with “visual meetings” that are based on the idea that visualizing what is being presented in a meeting will stick better and longer too. So far I have only experimented with this but not really used it in presentations or meetings. Although, intuitively I did already do it: what I like doing in meetings is to loosely prepare what I plan to say but instead of preparing something formal I open a bunch of PPT presentations, have websites I want to show or talk about ready and open on my laptop. This way the whole conversation is very customized and entirely focused on what the other side wants to hear and what questions come up. I basically let the other side (e.g. a prospective client) guide me through what I say.
Now another tool popped up, called Prezi. I started playing with it yesterday and figured that it is basically exactly supporting my presentation style as described above. I think it could be used for a bunch of things such as:
- create a formal presentation, preparing it is now really fun
- create an informal presentation as described above, now this looks suddenly even well prepared and impressive while still keeps all the flexibility
- explain things and create a self-running tutorial, ideal for e.g. software manuals or any “How tos…”
- use it to write down and visualize what is said in meetings and presentations (basically a tool to support visual meetings)
Tags: GoogleDocs, Idea Creation, Prezi, visual meetings