If you want to make a presentation that is to fascinate the audience, and you have to choose between the traditional tool, which is Microsoft PowerPoint, and the new non-linear tool Prezi, what application will you choose? Which presentation will be better? Both of these presentation design programs have their undoubted advantages, but they also have some limitations.
Let's take a closer look at them.
Microsoft PowerPoint or Prezi - what is better for your presentation
?
Microsoft PowerPoint presentations
PowerPoint uses over 500 million users worldwide and is now recognized as the basic program for creating presentations. This is a great application to tell a linear story of creating a background for our speech. The structure of the slides is stacked, where, passing linearly between successive slides, we show successive information. PowerPoint is a desktop application installed on our computer - we do not need an internet connection to design a presentation. In the latest version of this program we can choose between the slide size 16: 9 and 4: 3.
PowerPoint is a very easy tool that next to Word and Excel is included in the Microsoft Office suite. When designing, we have linear navigation, where we design subsequent parts of information on the following slides. Before designing, we have the ability to set your own presentation template and adapt it to our needs. PowerPoint gives you the ability to attach photos, graphics, structures, as well as choose a color from the entire palette to customize our template.
When it comes to designing slides, here we have the freedom to arrange the elements, choosing many, many fonts, colors and ready schemes. We have a wide selection of animations of transitions between slides as well as animation of elements on a particular slide. However, all these options must be used sensitively, because free selection from such a huge list of fonts or animations can cause a disturbed message and reduce the aesthetic value of the presentation.
When designing, we may also be limited by the size of the slide, which is predefined. If we need to put more information on one slide, it is sometimes troublesome. Thanks to the fact that PowerPoint is one of the tools in the Office suite, we can easily copy tables and charts from Excel, link content and edit in PowerPoint. Additional interesting features are revealed when we want to print a presentation. We can choose between many printing options - among others print the presentation as slides or as a script, set the number of slides on one sheet, etc.
During the presentation, when the computer is connected to the projector, we can use the practical function of previewing the next slide on our computer. This allows the presenter to easily figure out what will be on the next slide, and prepare properly to smoothly move on to the next part of the presentation.
The presentation file can be saved to several formats - including the closed version of the presentation as well as for editing.
For other people to edit the presentation, they must have PowerPoint installed on their computer. It is quite difficult to maintain one version of the presentation if we work on it together with other people at the same time.
Prezi presentations
Prezi is a completely new tool for designing presentations. Established in 2009 in Budapest. In 2014, around 40 million people use them. The approach to presentation design is completely different in this application. Instead of individual slides, we have a large space where we can arrange the elements of our presentation. Compared to PowerPoint, Prezi is a non-linear tool, we can freely design transitions between slides within it.
Prezi is available to users in the SaaS system (Software as a Service), i.e. we pay annually for access to the application. Prezi provides three types of accounts:
Public account, where we can design and present the presentation for free. Designing is done through the website www.prezi.com The limitation is that every presentation we make is public, i.e. any Prezi user can see it after searching on www.prezi.com. An additional limitation is the Prezi logo on the bottom left when displaying the presentation. We have 100 MB of disk space, which is enough for about 15 presentations. The functionality of this account is 95% the same as in the Enjoy and Pro paid accounts, so it's quite enough to start the adventure with Prezi.
The Enjoy account is payable around $ 59 per year, we can only design a presentation via the website www.prezi.com, we have 500MB available, which is enough for about 70 presentations. We can manage our presentation regarding its visibility, i.e. we can make it public, share only with selected people, or set it private - visible only to us. Instead of the Prezi badge, we can insert any logo.
The PRO account is paid $ 159 a year, and in addition to the fact that we can design a presentation through a web browser, we can also install the application on our computer and design directly on it, without access to the internet. We can save all created presentations on our computer and have access to them at any time. We can also synchronize each presentation with prezi.com. We have 2GB of cloud space for our presentations.
Prezi gives you the ability to customize the presentation template to our needs, add and format texts, add images, videos, diagrams and graphics. However, we can't easily transfer charts from Excel to Prezi. Charts and tables must be saved as an image and only then can we transfer them to Prezi. In general, all graphic content of the presentation must be created outside Prezi, because graphics formatting options are here
limited.
The main advantage of Prezi is the ability to zoom in and out of the camera to specific elements of the presentation. If we want to show details, we can zoom in on these elements. If we want to nest one inscription in another, it is also possible. It depends on us how we present specific elements, how much information will be on our individual slides. We have a huge space available.
Prezi gives you full flexibility in the design of transitions between slides, which makes watching presentations more natural. In addition, we can achieve a great 3D effect in our presentations by properly placing elements of the presentation. Thanks to the fact that Prezi is a tool available through the Internet, we can easily work in a group and edit our presentation in several people at the same time. All changes are made on a regular basis. People who edit presentations can see the changes made to the Prezi presentation in real time.
An interesting feature is sharing presentations for viewing. We send a link to the people to whom we want to present the presentation, through which they can view the presentation on their computers, even if they do not have a Prezi account.
Presentations from any account (Public, Enjoy or Pro) can be saved to our disk on a computer and played offline, without access to the Internet. The weakness of such a solution is the very large size of such a presentation. For example, two slides
in Prezi saved for playback is about 50MB. It's difficult to send such a file by email, but you can use solutions such as Dropbox or wetransfer.com. We also have the option to save the presentation to PDF, then each slide is on a separate page.
Summary - what to choose, Prezi or PowerPoint?
If you have limited time, you do not have internet access and want to display your message in a simple way, individual passwords or numbers on each slide, then you can do it using PowerPoint. However, if you have a moment to think about the structure of the presentation and you want to cause the WOW effect among viewers, it's hot to use Prezi. Presentations at Prezi are more interactive and the audience is more focused waiting for what will appear in your presentation.
Personally, I prefer to use Prezi Desktop for my presentations. Prezi Desktop is available in your PRO account. With this program I can create a presentation very quickly, I am not limited by the size of the content, photo or diagram, because I can always zoom
to a specific item.
When faced with the choice of Prezi or PowerPoint, we must be aware that in each case, efficiency in using these programs is required. The more often we use each of them, the easier it will be for us to design interesting presentations.
It's also worth seeing what has changed in PowerPoint and how it competes with Prezi using Zoom Slide !