Reviewed: Prezi

Prezi uses Adobe’s Flash technology to create animated presentations with a few clicks and drags. Instead of creating a series of separate slides, you put all your content—text, graphics, captions—on a single canvas, and then you trace a path from one item to another.

At first glance, Prezi Pro may seem like an inferior example of presentation software. But closer inspection reveals that Prezi Pro is simply so unique, comparing it to traditional slideshow makers just does not do it justice. Prezi Pro displays information not as a series of slides, but as one large board that zooms in on specific information or images. So while Prezi Pro doesn’t offer features like slide transitions, object animations, master slides or timed slide progression, it does offer a few features that are comparable.

With Prezi Pro, a presentation is created as a whole board. You lay out the information and visual aids however you like, then you create a “path” for the pan-and-zoom functions to follow. The end result? A presentation that starts with one bit of information, zooms out, pans to another bit of information, zooms in, etc. Certainly an interesting alternative to typical slideshow presentation.

As you create and edit your Prezi presentation, each item that you add to the canvas can be moved, resized, or rotated, and you can change the overall look of the presentation by clicking on a gallery of styles. When you or anyone else views your presentation in a browser, what they see is an animated tour of the canvas, instead of a series of slides. The browser first zooms in on the first item in the path you created, then it zooms out again, then in again on the second item, and so on for each remaining item, until it reaches the end of the path. The whole effect is far closer to high-end graphics on a TV commercial than a boring set of bullet point slides.