News broke today in the presentation technology world of a brand new version of Prezi – called Prezi Business… Could this be the PowerPoint alternative everyone’s been waiting for?
This new version of the platform that’s been around for 7 years includes several interesting new features over and above the standard Prezi Membership Licenses …
Collaboration
“Build your Prezis together in real time, even when you’re continents apart.”
Those of you that read our review of PowerPoint 2016 will know this is a sore subject after the quite frankly abject let down of Office 2016’s extremely poor collaboration offering. The difference here, though, is that whilst desktop creation of Prezi’s is possible, for most end users it will always be a cloud-based platform, so in theory this could be a bit of game changer.
Present Anywhere
“Any time, on any device. Send a link to share your prezi in crisp HD with anyone in the world—no third-party screen-sharing software needed.”
A nice feature and a much needed move to keep up with PowerPoint, which has had features such as Present Online, convert to Video and Tablet Apps all for quite some time. One word of warning, a presentation is an aid for a presenter, if an audience gets the full story from the presentation alone you might want to review how much text is on each slide/frame! Make sure you take advantage of Prezi’s ability to add voiceover clips to your presentation.
Analytics
“Know who views your prezi, which parts of it, and for how long. Then target your message to the right people at the right time. Track your team’s performance in real time. Use the competitive sales data to fire up productivity and motivation.”
Again, another nice feature that plays to Prezi’s strength of being an online presentation tool. With other web-based communication platforms entering the scene such as Turtl, adding analytics is an essential move.
If the platform really does tell you who has viewed your Prezi then this is some extremely powerful information in the hands of the sales presenter and it’s something that PowerPoint can’t achieve at present. One for the Office development team at Microsoft to pick up on, we think…
Interactivity
“Prezi Business lets you adapt your pitch on the fly to address what matters to each customer. Skip forward, explore a side topic, or jump back to review—all without flipping through slides.”
Now this is really something, this is essentially custom shows for Prezi. But first, Prezi’s navigation has always been something of a myth…
The truth about Prezi…
Ok, this isn’t some big bad reveal, but if you think Prezi is anything massively different to PowerPoint that’s simply not the case…
Prezi is canvas based and gives you free rein to roam around…
This is very true, but with content essentially being able to be hidden in a microdot, it would take some serious practice and time for a presenter to learn and remember where exactly to zoom into to find the content. It might well end up not being exactly the slickest and smoothest experience.
This rather unstructured approach leads to most people putting content into frames, which are essentially slides. The frames are numbered (like slides) and each time you click forward you travel to the next frame – sound familiar?
Prezi Business doesn’t change this. But with the addition of interactivity it really does improve the experience, as ,just like in PowerPoint’s custom shows, you can now click into further detail if you want to… thus avoiding frames that you might decide not to show during the presentation.
The fact is, though, PowerPoint has had interactivity and the option to navigate around slides like a website for over 10 years. So whilst this is most definitely an improvement it was badly needed just to keep up…
To summarise…
It’s important to remember that Eyeful are not simply a Prezi or PowerPoint presentation design company, we are the presentation experts…
We believe effective, result winning presentations start with proper planning, and strong and effective messages in place.
Whether it be Prezi, PowerPoint, Keynote or whatever tool you use to create and deliver in, these tools aren’t going to help you create a great presentation on their own.
It’s good to see Prezi evolving, most of the business features added are to keep up with programs such as PowerPoint, a couple of which now set Prezi slightly ahead (in a couple of areas) of Microsoft’s flagship program…
But with the Business License coming in at a reported $50 per month, you’re certainly paying for them – whether it’s worth it or not is up to you…
This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Simon Morton – View the original post .