When an article titled “We Have Met the Enemy and He is PowerPoint” appeared in the New York Times this week, we couldn’t resist chiming in. We know that any tool can be used to make a bad presentation, but the wrong tool can completely lose your message. Here’s how:
We believe that the lack of focus, not the complexity of the slide, is the problem. Without focus, you cannot foster a dialogue. And, without dialogue, you cannot make a persuasive point. In Prezi, you can use size and scale for layering information to avoid showing an overwhelming number of details in one view. That way your audience can focus on a specific point, without getting lost in the details. When your audience is with you, they’re more likely to ask questions and engage in dialogue – helping you make your point.
The same slide could have been more clearly presented in Prezi. Here’s how:
Prezi’s been invited to Prezinteren, a conference on presentations in Utrecht, the Netherlands this June. The Prezi themed event is hosted by one of the leaders of the Prezi community in the Netherlands, Jeanet Bathoorn who is a social media and presentations expert. There will be webinars, workshops and talks during the one day conference about how to avoid the pitfalls of presenting, how to do great webinars, and how to make better presentations with Prezi.
The highlight of the day will be the announcement of the Prezi Pro Award winner. The price goes to the prezi that we’ll find best in using the the Prezi approach and features to visualize thoughts and ideas. Submit your work and win!
We are excited to finally meet the amazing Dutch community!
Prezi Desktop 3 is a brand new version of Prezi’s offline editor that comes with the Prezi Pro license. You can save your prezis to a native file format called .pez, and (yes!) you can convert your prezis to .pdf and print them – one path step per page.
Spring is finally here and Prezi is celebrating with new features based on the valuable feedback we receive from you on our community forums. Thanks for developing these new features with us. Play around with them and have your say in the comments area!
Seasick no more
We often hear about seasickness caused by excessive panning in Prezi. The best way to prevent this is to pan less and structure your presentation with frames. Based on your feedback on the test version, improved camera transitions in prezis have been released. The new transition works on both old and new prezis. (This feature development was based on the article: Smooth and Efficient Zooming and Panningby Jarke J. van Wijk and Wim A.A. Nuij).
Hidden frames
With hidden frames, your content comes forward. Group elements in Edit mode, hide frames during Show mode. You can find this option in the online and desktop versions, and inside the “Frame” bubble of the menu.
Copy and paste between prezis
Work less by copying and pasting elements from one prezi to another (both browser tabs and separate windows work). Sometimes it’s easier to use only specific parts of reusable prezis!
To perform copy/paste between prezis:
open a prezi
go to “Write” mode, select an element, or groups of elements by clicking them once
hit Ctrl+c
open a different prezi in another tab or window, go to “Write” mode
hit Ctrl+v.
note: use this keyboard shortcut even on Mac computers to perform copy/paste.
Since we have introduced Prezi’s EDU licenses, our educational user base is growing fast. Based on the community’s great feedback, we set up a place where teachers and students can share their work with others and pull nice prezis they may want to reuse in their classes. To enhance the experience of those working in education and using Prezi, we created an educational Prezi wiki, edu.prezi.com.
Using this page you can:
1. easily browse prezis by subject
2. get inspiration for how others are using Prezi within the education field
3. find prezis you can reuse if you don’t feel like making all your educational prezis from scratch
Here is how you can join the conversation on this forum:
1. Prezi’s edu wiki was set up and moderated by our US based colleague, Patrick. First thing to do is send a short email request to patrick.wenger_at_prezi.com.
2. Sign-in once the invitation is received
3. Search for and share prezis by subject
4. Now you can start to share your prezis with or find the link of a Prezi you might want to reuse.
Join and share your prezis and experience with others!
Prezi had the great opportunity to cooperate with the World Economic Forum’s IdeasLab session this year organized as a part of the annual world leader’s meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Five speakers have chosen Prezi to visualize their messages at the event, including Sir Tim Berners Lee, the MIT professor who invented the WWW protocol. The meeting is now over and we thought it would be a cool source of inspiration for all of us prezi authors to have the Davos experiences shared.
Putting together the agenda, faculty manager of the IdeasLab Anne-Sophie Duprat works with speakers from Harvard, Yale, Oxford, the MIT and INSEAD throughout the year, she knows what it takes to create a compelling presentation. Anne-Sophie kindly accepted our interview request and shared her experiences with us.
What do you think makes a good presentation?
From my experience with the IdeasLabs, it’s also challenging for top speakers to produce a good presentation. In my opinion, what makes a presentation successful is its capacity to capture the full attention of the audience, therefore a reasonable duration is an important quality. Another key element for a good presentation is to keep the audience in mind: for example, in the IdeasLab, not all participants have the same level of experience or knowledge of the topic and do not all have the same professional background, which is why we recommend that our speakers keep their presentations simple and use evocative visuals instead of text as a form of communication – details and questions can be addressed further in smaller groups. A good presentation should also create lasting memories for the audience.
Duarte is the planet’s most acclaimed presentation design company. They have clients like Apple, Google, Cisco or Adobe and worked with Al Gore on visualizing his Nobel Peace prize winner talk. Now Duarte have a post on their company blog about how Prezi provided the best solution for a great initiative to go visual. It’s Global Citizen Year, a movement for US high school seniors who engage in a transformative “bridge year” between high school and college. Successfully applied teens get the chance to learn a foreign language, have a global perspective and a clearer sense of themselves.
Duarte and Prezi came to the picture when GCY realized the need of a solution to visually explain their offer to young Americans. With the help of Duarte in clarifying their message and Prezi to visualize their thoughts they could solve their communication problems and created this awesome prezi:
Read the full story on the Duarte blog about how GCY solved their problems with the lead of Nancy Duarte’s famous book slide:ology, and visualized their message with Prezi.
The Economist is launching its inaugural event, Innovation: Fresh thinking for the ideas economy, at the University of California, Berkeley on March 23 and 24 and we’re thrilled to be a part of it! With its unique approach, this event is a marketplace for ideas focused on innovation, intelligent infrastructure, and human potential. Described as a multi-part, multimedia forum designed to fuse creativity with action, this event will expand and possibly overturn established thinking about what innovation is, where it comes from, and how to make it work.
The confirmed speaker line-up includes an impressive list of academics, authors, entrepreneurs, and executives. The featured speakers were announced using a nice Prezi on the event’s site! We are proud to be part of the event and cooperating with the conference. Check the prezi here:
We’re ready to release a new feature in the Prezi editor this week, and we want you to name it.
Oh…and for the sake of excitement, you have to find the new feature by exploring the online Prezi editor. We’ll give you a hint: it’s not a spectacular something, still it will be very important in the future.
Rules:
To enter the contest, add the following experimental extension to any prezi URL: http://prezi.com/************/edit/experimental/guess-what
Every contest needs a reward, right? So, the first Prezi author to send an email to contest@prezi.com with a screenshot, name for the feature and a short feature description will win a 1-year Prezi Pro upgrade!
The contest starts now. It lasts for one week only, so start zooming! We accept submissions between 00:00 Monday March 15. PST and 00:00 Monday March 22. PST.
The winner will be introduced in the next Prezi newsletter at the end of the month, and also here on the blog. We’ll post hints to our Twitter account @prezi two times during the contest, so keep your eyes open!
Embedding videos to a presentation can give extra value to a talk. Film is indubitably the most powerful story telling tool, choosing to present your ideas with the aid of an embedded video can add a dramatic effect to your topic. We kept this in mind when we have developed YouTube integration to Prezi. Many presentation tools can handle video files, you can upload them from your hard drive to the presentation. With Prezi, you can do this too of course. However it was a logical step for Prezi – an online presentation tool – to go beyond this approach and offer a much simpler and faster solution.
Embedding YouTube videos to prezis opens new possibilities for the presenter. You just need to create a new textbox by double clicking the canvas, then paste a YouTube video URL and press OK. That’s it. Should it be a spectacular ballroom presentation that you have created to stun your audience, or a business meeting where you need to deliver hardcore data and information, this option always comes handy.
Our recent upgrade allows you to play, pause, adjust and control the volume of embedded YouTube videos right in the editor or in show mode while you present. Prezi’s new navigation bar for YouTube videos is a feature we have just released, so check the screencast below, and try it out with your editor now!
