One of the best-known alternatives to Microsoft PowerPoint is the online tool Prezi. Since its entry into the market back in 2009, this web-based presentation tool has earned a large fan base in relatively little time. Prezi is a great alternative for anyone who wants to make their presentations more active and experiment with less conventional designs. The latter is because the tool doesn’t offer the classic design approach recognizable from PowerPoint, with slides presented individually – instead, it offers a dynamic approach to content creation. Using a sort of digital screen, you arrange your content in the way you want it presented and then later zoom in and out throughout the presentation to enlarge the relevant fields.
Despite the homepage’s promise of an effortless transition and ease-of-use, it’s important to note that the first time you work on Prezi, you’ll notice a difference. It functions in an entirely different way to PowerPoint, meaning you’ll have to pay more attention to your design and focus on the way you navigate your presentation. The challenge here is to make sensible connections between the individual contentsegments on the screen. It’s only by doing this that you can make sure your audience keeps the overview of the slideshow in mind and can follow the presentation’s own logic or train of thought properly. This means Prezi is often less effective for complicated and long presentations, as it can be easy for listeners to get lost in these. There’s also the danger that you could overuse the exciting range of effects on offer. For this reason, it’s important to keep perspective when using Prezi and remember that a presentation is designed to highlight key content and emphasize important aspects, not constantly attract the viewer’s attention with thousands of snazzy effects. The golden rule with Prezi is that less is often more.
But if you follow this advice and use Prezi as it is intended, the program offers you all the tools you need to create a truly vivid, engaging, and unique presentation. This is where you need to think about your environment: Depending on the audience and the occasion, a traditional PowerPoint presentation may be more appropriate. PowerPoint has the benefit of being the flagship application for presentations, meaning that its simple structure and traditional layout is familiar to essentially everybody. But if you’ve had enough of this static and dynamically limited presentation software, then Prezi represents an excellent PowerPoint alternative.