Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Tired: PowerPoint. Wired: Prezi

It's the new coolness:



The danger, of course, if that you'll use your habits developed for the old medium in this new way of doing business.  The two major downfalls that I've seen (in my four hours of using it) is either doing a boring old PowerPoint presentation in Prezi, or turning on all the uber cool animations and making the Geocities of Presentations.

But this - while perhaps flirting with the Geocities pitfall - will never be confused with a boring old Powerpoint slide show:



Prezi makes you understand your story, what you want to communicate to the listeners.  It seems essentially impossible to do the old PowerPoint "Show up and throw up" lazy presenter cop out: I've got 87 slides here, so stop me when you see something you like.

I expect that I'll be playing with this for a month before I make something worth having.  But then I'll have something worth having.  Cool stuff.  The rabbit hole goes deep.  And who ever though anyone would say that about a PowerPoint replacement?

4 comments:

  1. I wouldn't stand too close to the guys who made that video. Disney's aim is usually pretty good, but the blast radius of one of their copyright infringement lawsuits is substantial.

    You Don't Mess with The Mouse.

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  2. Am I the only one who doesn't see anything remarkable? Just more memory-sucking graphics?

    Then again, I remember my combinations as strings of numbers, not the patterns my fingers make.

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  3. I've seen it before, and it can be a refreshing change. However, Mr. Radnai gives lie to his own big claim: the presenter still plans a linear path through the presentation. Mr. Radmai is also one godawful speaker: boring, keeps looking at his slides, etc. - if this is his best effort, he ought to leave marketing to someone with a bit of flair.

    As far as I can see, there is also no easy way to make your presentation material directly available to the audience. In the end, you will wind up re-formatting it into a standard document. This is an advantage of standard old slides - they are directly useful as handouts to the audience.

    A final note: The Prezi people are out to make money, nothing wrong with that. However, this talk is pretty clearly meant as a sales pitch. I don't know what event it was part of, but it seems to violate the "bias-free programming" standard of TEDx.

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  4. My daughter introduced me to Prezi last year; she'd used it at school. It appears to me to be a cross between Power-Point and Mindmap. Probably great for building a framework for and connections between items for a project and brainstorming, but not ideal for presenting it coherently IN THE WAY YOU NEED to make your argument. The linear style of Power Point enables that format.

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