Last month I gave a talk at the CASE District 8 conference in Portland on 10 things you can do with video on the internet. Probably what generated more comments and questions than my topic was that I was not using PowerPoint slides. I think I was the only one at the conference NOT using PowerPoint as it has become the defacto professional presentation format. I’ve been using PowerPoint for more than a decade, what could possibly replace it?

There has been a gradual backlash against PowerPoint and I’ve recently seen speakers use online wiki’s, their web sites or nothing at all. I experimented with a new format called Prezi. Prezi is a radical departure from the traditional slide show paradigm in that it is not linear. Think of the presentation area as a big blackboard or giant sheet of paper where you have been scribbling your thoughts and ideas as if you were just jotting notes down on a sheet of paper at your kitchen table. Nothing is lined up while your thoughts and doodles are randomly scattered at odd angles across the page. Important thoughts are bold and underlined with arrows connecting related thoughts and circles around related ideas. Afterthoughts are scattered around in the margins and minor points are little tiny notes crammed between more important thoughts. Perhaps you drew a picture or a chart to illustrate your thoughts.

Now your Mom comes in the kitchen and wants to know what you are doing. You explain your ideas while twisting and turning the page to better read each point and directing her attention with your pencil. Well, that’s what a Prezi presentation is like. You have a giant work area where you can write topic headings and lists; insert graphics and pictures; roll videos and audio files while flying around and zooming in to important points and zooming out again for an overview.

Why did I use it? Well, it is so darn dynamic. The format, movement and novelty engaged the audience and kept them interested for an hour long presentation. I told them that an old axiom in television is that when you don’t have anything important to say use special effects. There may have been some of that but I was also interested in exploring a new format.

Here is the presentation I gave at the conference. If you can’t see it follow this link.

Since then a lot of folks have been asking me what are the advantages, disadvantages and difference between the two formats. Here are my impressions:

Palette: The PowerPoint palette is almost endless. Any font or color that you can add to a Microsoft Windows product can be incorporated into PowerPoint in any combination.  Prezi has about eight pre-formatted templates and you cannot change the color, font or style. However you can upload any premade graphic and use that as your background. It is also possible to change PowerPoint slides into PDFs and upload them to a Prezi.

Video and Audio: PowerPoint supports a wide range of video and audio formats that can be embedded into the slide show and played automatically or in response to a click. Prezi will only support Flash files and embedded YouTube files. Of course if you use YouTube files you must be connected to the internet during the presentation. If you are not connected to the internet or if you want to use video from another site you must download the video, convert it to Flash and load that into the Prezi.

Special Effects: PowerPoint has a whole menagerie of flying fonts, whooshing sounds and dynamic transitions to emphasize, snazz up and generally draw attention to your presentation. Once you put in a font or graphic in a Prezi they are pretty static. The excitement comes from being able to fly around the screen, quickly zoom in, flip around then zoom out again during a presentation. In a Prezi the text does not fly in, you fly to the text. It is possible to insert interactive flash files and you can get more animation in that way.

Presentation: As I mentioned above, PowerPoint presentations, like most slide shows for the past 100 years, are linear. Slide one is followed by slide two and so on. If you are on slide 26 and you suddenly want to show something on slide 5 you need to back up through 21 slides or stop the show, scroll through the slides till you find slide 5. With a Prezi it is possible for the presenter to simply click the background with the mouse and the presentation zooms out to an overview then the presenter can zoom into the area they want. When they are ready to continue on they simply click the mouse and you are back to where you left off. The problem with this is that as a presenter you had better practice and know how to navigate because an inadvertent click can get you way off course and you may have a devil of a time finding your way back. The other thing is with Prezi you won’t be printing out the slides as a handout.

Other small things: The way Prezi defines a view is with frames which look like gray circles, brackets or boxes. When you set them up you are telling Prezi this is the area I want to see when I get to this frame. Prezi has done a good job of making these frames blend into the overall design but they can sometimes get in the way or interfere with an overall artistic look. For example if you are not careful it is easy for frames to overlap and you may be zoomed into one frame with the giant corner of another frame in your view.

Another thing you will need to deal with is the Prezi path. Even though a Prezi is not laid out in a linear fashion you still need to get from point A to point B and so on. So Prezi has you set up a path to tell it what comes next. If you are not careful you will soon end up with a rat’s nest of lines and numbers that can drive you to distraction and possibly back to PowerPoint. This “path” is not visible during the presentation.

Adding up the pros and cons may seem to tip in favor of PowerPoint but the movement and dynamics of my Prezi presentation kept folks at the conference talking about it for two days. Any artist knows it is possible to make great things within limits and just skimming the presentations at the Prezi site shows that you can do some pretty amazing things. Its best to take a look and judge for yourself.

For now I am going to keep experimenting with Prezi. It’s not hard to learn and it’s a lot of fun.  I just got a beta version of PowerPoint 2010 so I’ll need to put that through its paces and see what is new. Let me know what you think and if you prefer Prezi or PowerPoint.