Culture

Next time you have to give a presentation for a class, skip the PowerPoint and give Prezi a go. Prezi is a presentation tool that allows you to scribble all over a canvas, rather than organising your ideas into traditional slides.

Imagine a mind-map with fancy transition effects, embedded pictures and videos and an awesome background. Rather than being restricted by PowerPoint’s linear structure (that is, one slide after the next), you can express your ideas in a way that makes sense to you – the canvas is yours to do with what you will.

Prezi also brings depth to your presentations – you can zoom in or out of your canvas as much as you like, expressing layers of detail. Combine this with Prezi’s animation effects and you have a pretty fun tool for telling a story.

It takes a little while to adjust to the Prezi frame of mind. We’re so conditioned to think in terms of slides that it can be hard to break free of those little boxes. As you become more competent and familiar with Prezi, though, you’ll find that there’s a lot more scope for creative presentation and storytelling than there is with any other presentation tool.