I have always found PowerPoint limiting and wanted to find a presentation tool that feels more natural and provides better story telling capability. Last year I attended a meetup and noticed the tool used by the presenter was quite unusual. It zoomed in and out and worked like a mind map. I asked the presenter which tool he was using (ironically I found the tool more interesting than the topic he was presenting). He told me he was using a product called Prezi.
I made a mental notes to check it out. it was indeed very cool. I signed up a free account (like evernote, you can sign up a free account, the tool is cloud based) and played with it a bit. I liked it a lot. However, I didn't have any presentation I needed to prepare then so I just put the idea back on the shelf.
Lately I was preparing a design doc and found Prezi's ability to drill down to details really a great help. I can present an overall system architecture first, then zoom in to the design of each module, then zoom in to even more details. Very intuitive. Also, because everything in Prezi stays on the same canvas (instead of being fragmented into slides), the story line is preserved visually, making it easier to show the big picture too.
Plus, it's really fun to create a Prezi. I felt like becoming a kid in the elementary school art class again. (Don't let me mislead you, you can use a Prezi template and quickly create a nice presentation instead of starting from scratch.) To me, a tool that can makes me feel playful, is as good as it gets.
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