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Free from the Limits of the Slide
Updated November 30, 2018

Free from the Limits of the Slide

Marcelo de Vasconcellos | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Prezi

My organization is the biggest public health institution in Brazil. Since we deal with many aspects of health, such as research, teaching, and development, presenting our ideas is a frequent activity. At our organization, the researchers are free to choose their tools, and for many years PowerPoint reigned absolutely, but since we started to introduce Prezi, back in 2009, many people are turning to it to make their presentations more engaging and to give their ideas more impact. Since many fields in health sciences deal with large images which don't fit well in slides, the zooming ability of Prezi is particularly useful for us.
  • Prezi allows the presenter to zoom in and out from a presentation. This is particularly interesting when presenting large pictures, maps or infographics as is often the case in our institution.
  • Prezi gives more freedom at the moment of presenting. The presenter is not limited to going ahead or back along a single line but can zoom out and show alternate paths and frames.
  • Due to its very structure, Prezi encourages researchers and professors to organize their ideas on a multidimensional grid, making their lectures richer and engaging for the audiences.
  • The freedom of rotating the viewpoint can lead new users to create spinning presentations and even cause motion sickness. Despite not being a problem with the app itself, it is worth to have some caution.
  • On 2017, Prezi launched Prezi Next, designed from scratch so it didn't rely on Adobe Flash as the old Prezi (now called Prezi Classic) did. As a result, the feel of the app changed drastically. Prezi Classic (still active for accounts created before 2017) is more difficult to learn but gives more freedom over the path and the look of the presentation. Prezi Next is easier to learn but gives less freedom over the presentation. This situation can be confusing to the user.
  • On Prezi Classic, it is not possible to see all the content at once, requiring to search in each section for what has been placed before.
  • Our presentations became more direct, allowing the presenter to interact freely with images and maps in collaboration with the audience.
  • Lectures are more engaging since they tend to rely more on visual assets than on text blocks. The flyover and zooming transitions also contribute to making them more dynamic and interesting to the students.
  • Presenters tend to reduce the quantities of text on their presentations, focusing instead on maps, infographics, pictures and other visual data, making their presentations more visually compelling and raising more interest.
Other solutions for presentations all fall on the typical slideshow paradigm. So far, only Prezi walked away from this path. Its expanding canvas and freeform path are refreshing in this scenario. In this sense, Prezi is unique in its style of presentation, which makes difficult to establish comparisons based on costs. The still ongoing migration to Prezi Next has been a bit troubled, according to some old users, but it seems the company is working to give Prezi Next the same flexibility that Prezi Classic. And Prezi already has a huge user base that do not want to go back working with the limits of slides.
Prezi is well suited to presentations with many images, particularly those where it is useful to zoom into those images. It is also good for showing the alternate path and multiple choices in presentations. It is less appropriate for predominantly textual content, particularly, if this content follows a sequential order. Prezi benefits from an extra care in organizing visual elements and selecting meaningful images and, as such, requires a bit more effort than a typical slideshow application.

Prezi Feature Ratings

Evaluating Prezi and Competitors

Yes - PowerPoint. We wanted more freedom to show presentations (not only sequentially) and also the ability to zoom in and out of large maps and images. Prezi allows the presenter to make a more organic presentation of an image, zooming and dragging. This was important for us.
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
The most important factor was both the possibility of organizing content on a (potentially) infinite canvas and creating different paths for seeing this presentation, dragging, zooming in, out and so on. This flexibility to work with the space and with content, particularly with visual content, was very important in our decision.
We had to do a very quick selection process and, thankfully, we were very lucky in getting it just right with Prezi. If we had to to it again, we would devise a longer and more careful process for evaluating alternatives.