Prezi: The Coolest Thing Since...Dinosaurs, I Guess. Or Rocket Ships. Those are cool too.

One of my clinic teammates is really excited about making good presentations. This is great, because he's imparted that excitement onto our team. Probably everyone reading this has heard advice like "don't read off your slides" and "Don't write paragraphs for each bullet point", but I'm willing to bet that relatively few of you have ever tried to make a presentation that completely gets away from the PowerPoint paradigm. PowerPoint, an ancient relic of a past age that's too cumbersome to know that it's dead, encourages slides that look like this:

+--------+
| Title |
|*bullet |
|*bullet |
+--------+
or perhaps this:
+----------+
| Title |
|*bul |pic||
|*bul |___||
+----------+

*edit: HTML's reluctance to insert multiple spaces into a web page made this asciiart somewhat unpleasant to draw...Non-breaking spaces fixed it.

This makes for a very dull presentation, even with an enthusiastic speaker. This is, certainly, a valid style of presentation, but relatively few topics actually benefit from it, and very few presenters know how to make it work to their advantage. It became mainstream because it was just about the limit of what PowerPoint (and computers, really) could do back in the old days. PowerPoint, being a part of the most prolific productivity software suite ever, reached the masses, and an entire generation of students was brought up learning how to use it and carrying that knowledge into the business world.

Unfortunately, they mostly learned how to use the very basic features. PowerPoint has grown beyond its original limitations, but people have stayed behind and still mostly use the basic templates depicted above.

Enter Keynote. I am a PC user -- I run Windows XP on my Tablet PC and Ubuntu Linux on my (distressingly old) desktop. That said, Apple's Keynote software left me speechless the first time I used it. Nearly as intuitive as the iPod, I sat down and knew how to do nearly anything the instant I first tried. It made building a presentation fun, like the classier breed of really horrible Flash games you find online and can't stop playing.

The two presentations that my clinic team has done were built using Keynote, and both were probably among the best presentations that have been given for clinic projects (in my completely informed and unbiased opinion). Instead of bullet points, we had little circles representing our users that scooted around the screen, and lines that appeared between them, and several other gimmicky animations that really made the presentation far more interesting that a static screen full of bullet points.

3 days ago Marty came into my room and said "I just IM'd you a link...check this out." The link was http://prezi.com, and the "this" to check out was one of the samples at the bottom of the home page. Go there. View the three samples. You'll be amazed.

This is cooler than dinosaurs, cooler than space ships, cooler than those awful flash games, and even cooler than sliced bread (although there is some debate about the dinosaurs). This program, called Prezi by taking the Hungarian dimunitive form of the English word "presentation", tries to escape slides altogether. It is a seriously cool piece of software that really has the potential to change the way people give presentations.

Three of my clinic teammates have signed up to be Beta testers, so with any luck our final presentation will be given using Prezi. For those of you interested in it, you can check out the Prezi blog at http://blog.prezi.com and you can follow several of the founders on Twitter.

~KMarsh