PowerPoint tips and tricks #3

My friend Mick pointed me to an online presentation creator called Prezi that does some really cool zooming and turning effects to give motion and drama to a presentation.

I wanted to embed an example here to show the neat effect, but their software is proprietary and won't allow it. I played around with it a bit and I think it's a great idea for many presentations. It allows you to dynamically zoom in and out on specific elements to take a closer look. So if you have that graph in there and no one asks a question about it, you can stay zoomed out, but if someone wants more detail you can oblige them.

Of course PowerPoint wants to play too, and of course they get the gold star for effort. But their version (pptPlex) has the gist of Prezi without having the style. The cool thing about pptPlex is that you can use it with PowerPoint and adapt your existing presentations to the new format, so it could save a lot of work, but their stock backgrounds and layouts are as bad as anything the Microsoft has put out.

For sheer coolness, Prezi wins. For usability, pptPlex is a bit easier on the learning curve. For sermons I won't use either.

When I preach, the sermon is a living thing and changes from what I practiced. Both of these options require more of a linear flow than I am willing to use in my sermons. I will probably use something like this for presentations to potential supporting congregations as I feel it lends itself very well to that application.

3 out of 5 stars.