Move over PowerPoint, Here comes Prezi!

April 8, 2015
Communications

by Debora Hermele, Intern with SupermarketGuru

As a retail dietitian, it’s important to communicate your ideas and programs as effectively as possible. You already make creative and inspiring presentations to shoppers, your senior management, vendors and fellow employees. A newer tool you may want to consider to add a three-dimensional aspect to your presentations is Prezi, which allows your pictures and information to successfully pull your audience in. 

When creating your first Prezi you might be confused, but Prezi is in fact very easy to work with once you get familiar. You have the choice to use a creative template or start with a blank canvas, which makes it easy to get started. You can always copy and paste pre-made content from other presentations to save time and to create an original and personalized Prezi. One of Prezi’s strongest features is the Path, which shows your audience how your information is related. This is a great feature because it gives your audience an overview, making your content relatable and interesting. To create a successful Prezi, plan out your content and the order you want to present it before you start making the actual presentation. 

To make a creative presentation you have to think outside the box. Even though PowerPoint has good formats, it encourages linear thinking that can make a presentation seem dull. It is hard to engage a big audience, and a presentation can easily become wordy and slow. Prezi, on the other hand, makes it very easy to customize your presentation and encourages you to combine text, images and multimedia in a creative way. Prezi’s three-dimensional feature is exciting and will both make your presentation more memorable and meaningful. 

Prezi uses new terms and key features. What PowerPoint calls slides, Prezi calls frames. A valuable feature in Prezi is a Zoomable tool that makes it easy to edit texts, images and videos in your frames. You can increase and decrease material just by clicking on any object on the canvas. This feature is one reason many presenters prefer Prezi over PowerPoint. All of your frames are connected and to get an overview, click on the home button located on the right side of your canvas. 

Prezi is free and very user-friendly. Follow these steps to learn how this new product can help improve your presentations:

1. Go to http://prezi.com and create an account. 
2. Click on the Create New Prezi button. 
3. Choose a template or blank canvas.
4. Click anywhere on your canvas and start tying to add text.
5. Use the Zoomable Prezi canvas to edit your content.
6. By using the Transformation Tool you can move, scale, and rotate your material.
7. Get familiar with the Insert button and customize your Prezi. 
8. To start your presentation click on Show (top left on the screen) 

RDBA is all about community, so if you decide to make a Prezi we’d like to share it as inspiration for others. Please send your Prezi to Debbie@supermarketguru.com.