Benefits to Using Prezi Instead of PowerPoint Slides

In my past life as a graphic designer, I was always looking for an alternative to PowerPoint slide presentations. I knew that people dreaded the typical slide deck that has become so common - word charts with too many words, graphs with too much detail, irrelevant images from stock file houses and bullet point after bullet point.

As a member of the speaker support team, we used to call it "Death by PowerPoint." Slide shows have been around for many decades, of course. The most boring shows are similar to the one-projector "bombs" that filled many boardrooms over the years.

As a multi-media producer in the '80s, I learned to design and show multi-image slide shows, which used multiple projector systems and were able to improvise a rudimentary form of animation. They were costly, but effective. With the introduction of computers and Microsoft's presentation tool PowerPoint, just about anyone could become a graphic designer by simply transferring a Word doc outline into the program and loading a template. As meetings proliferated, so did the slide decks. Now they are found all over the web, in the form of webinars and web conferences, by the thousands. Every day, another online meeting host is launching a PowerPoint slide deck and audiences are becoming less and less interested.

Then, in steps Prezi. I found this tool just a few weeks ago and have really enjoyed working with it. This graphic presentation software called " Prezi " could change the nearly religious use of slides in online meetings, by introducing a new way of visual storytelling that is much less boring.

Prezi's functions and uses are easy to understand, because menus are simple. Within a Prezi presentation, an author can use high-resolution still images, wordcharts and graphics, plus clean text and zooming and panning animations that allow the presenter to show a "big-picture" visual. Videos and PDFs can also be placed in Prezi files.

The software is designed to move the viewer along a path around a big-picture view. It also lets the author hide or show elements by making them too small to be seen until a certain time in the overall presentation. The slide transitions are very different in this Flash-based tool which allows the designer to take the audience on a path from beginning from end, or to stop along the path and interact with the content. And that is what is usually missing from the typical PowerPoint slide deck - surprise.

When a designer has the ability to zoom in to any areas of charts and graphics, without having to redraw or reorganize the data, so that the presenter can speak directly to a specific point that is demonstrated by the data, things get interesting. Presenters can show the zoomed-in portion of a graph and then easily back out to visualize the big picture. After completing a Prezi design and impressing both my clients and my webinar audiences, it's clear that I'll never look at a slide deck in a webinar quite the same way again.

Gary Jesch is the owner and virtual event specialist at [http://consolecall.com]Console Call, helping hosts who conduct online meetings and webinars. He also runs [http://chops.com]CHOPS Live Animation and is a pioneer in the art of performance animation of 3D interactive cartoon characters for business meetings, tradeshow traffic building and special events.

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