Even though Prezi is growing in popularity and has gained over 20 million users since I first started using it I am still amazed at how often I’m asked ‘So what is this Prezzy thing all about?’….and yes most people even spell it wrongly as I did just then.
I’m writing this post whilst on the train to London to deliver another Prezi Training session. It’s my fifth trip into London in as many weeks and when I’m not in the capital delivering Prezi training I’m more than likely doing it somewhere else in the UK or Ireland, as well as managing a number of Prezi design projects!
Needless to say that Prezi (and peoples love of it) is keeping me extremely busy which is great. It’s been an amazing few years of discovering Prezi and starting a Prezi blog, to becoming an official independent expert, writing a Prezi book, and now running my own Prezi design and training business.
But even though Prezi is growing in popularity and has gained over 20 million users since I first started using it I am still amazed at how often I’m asked ‘So what is this Prezzy thing all about?’….and yes most people even spell it wrongly as I did just then. What is really interesting to me is the responses I hear from people who think they know what Prezi is all about. They are normally responses such as….
1. Oh Prezzi (another common misspell) is just a wizzier PowerPoint
2. It’s a presentation tool you can use for free, but it’s only an online system so no good for us
3. It’s amazing, you can spin everything around and zoom in and out all the time
4. It’s great for really visual presentations with nice images, but not very good for lots of data and text
5. Oh it looks great but when I tried to use it I created a mess. You need to be creative to use it I think
And on and on and on it goes………..
It’s really clear to me that whilst people realise that Prezi can do wonders for a presentation, most are still really struggling to get their head around the concept of Prezi and don’t really understand ‘what it’s all about’.
Prezi myths
So here it is. I’m going to try and explain exactly what Prezi is all about, and dispel all of the myths mentioned above.
1. Oh Prezzi (another common misspell) is just a wizzier PowerPoint
No no no, The only similarity that Prezi and PowerPoint share is that they have been built to help people present and share ideas. Prezi doesn’t use slides like Ppt does which means you have much more freedom to design the journey that you take your audience on. It also makes it much easier for your audience to see the ‘Big Picture’ (something we teach a lot in training) and understand the relationships between your content.
The main point though is there are NO slides……..aaarrrgghhh how scary!
2. It’s a presentation tool you can use for free, but it’s only an online system so no good for us
Wrong dummy! There are three licence types you can use. Public licence is free and means you can only use the online system via Prezi.com, and your presentations will be public. However you can download a 30 free trial of the Prezi desktop software and use Prezi offline for a while. Enjoy licence only allows you to use Prezi online again but it has all of the security you need to keep your presentations completely private, and you can also add your own logo to the canvass for a professional branded look. Pro licences give you all of the above plus you can download the Prezi desktop software (www.prezi.com/desktop) and work offline. This actually gives you an extra layer of security because all your presentations will be saved as .PEZ files on your computer. To share your presentation with colleagues you can upload it to your account on the Prezi website and then send out viewing links or a link to present online in real time.
3. It’s amazing, you can spin everything around and zoom in and out all the time
Death by Prezi is talked about a lot, and it’s only caused when someone who thinks that the movement of Prezi is the main reason for using it. If you think that making your presentation spin and zoom around like crazy are going to help your audience engage with the content then you’re very wrong. The only thing it will do is make people throw up from motion sickness!
Sure the transitions and movement you see in a Prezi do look nice, and it’s refreshing for audience members who are fed up with seeing PowerPoint slides, BUT less is always more.
TIP – Planning your Prezi well and keeping content fairly close together will help you avoid too many big leaps across the canvass and crazy zooms.
4. It’s great for really visual presentations with nice images, but not very good for lots of data and text
You have it soooo wrong my friend. At The Prezenter Ltd we love getting stuck into Prezi designs that have lots of data, graphs, charts, and so on. The great thing about using Prezi for presentations that have lots of data is that you can take a very dull looking bar chart for instance and zoom into each row and column to explain the details of that piece of data.
By doing this you remove all the visual distraction caused by your audience seeing the whole chart, and you really allow people to focus in on the nitty gritty details. Plus you can add more details into the areas you’re zooming into.
We have seen so many PowerPoint presentations that have 3, 4, sometimes more charts and graphs on every slide. Do you really think that your audience is going to focus and concentrate on one particular detail at a time when they can see everything at once? Well with Prezi they can because you’ll take them to the detail, and they’ll remember more because of it.
5. Oh it looks great but when I tried to use it I created a mess. You need to be creative to use it I think
This is my favourite response. I hold my hands up and admit that yes I do have a design background which means I can create Prezis, PowerPoints, and pretty much any document to a higher design standard than most. But that doesn’t mean that a typical business person who has used PowerPoint for the last 20 years can’t build some amazing looking, and incredibly engaging Prezis.
You don’t need to be a designer at all. What you do need to do is ditch the PowerPoint (slide by slide) way of thinking which can be extremely difficult for most.
The problem most new Prezi users face is that they’ve used PowerPoint for a long long time, and that tool leads you through the build of your presentation e.g. here’s slide 1, now here’s slide 2, and 3, and so on. In Prezi this process is completely reversed and when building a Prezi from a blank template you need to do the leading. It’s up to you to tell Prezi where you want it to go and what you want the audience to see.
This is a very leap for most of us and it’s exactly why people give up to quickly and don’t get the kind of results they were expecting.
The way to resolve this is again through planning. Do you ever plan your PowerPoints? Probably not, you really should but no one does. With Prezi it’s crucial you know the journey you’re taking the audience on, and you have to have the map in front of you before you get in and drive! This is something we teach a lot of in our online and classroom Prezi Training programs. I believe it’s the key to mastering Prezi.
So do we all know what Prezi is about now?
Hopefully this article has helped. I think it’ll take a little while yet but eventually everyone will understand what Prezi is and where it fits in the world.
To me Prezi is about giving presenters freedom. As presenters we can achieve the same objectives in our presentations as we used to with PowerPoint, except now we get to decide which route we take to get there, and we can stop off along the way to show our audiences some really interesting details that they might have missed in the past.
I’d love to hear what Prezi is to you so please Tweet me @ThePrezenter and use #ToMePrezi is……
I’m always on Twitter (@ThePrezenter) and various other social networks trying to help new Prezi users, and I just loved this tweet from Canadian Photographer Rebecca Nash.
