Prezi vs. Microsoft PowerPoint

If you’ve ever sat through a presentation that used Prezi, you know exactly what I mean when I say its absolute eye candy. If Prezi has one thing going for it, it has to be its visual appearance. There’s simply nothing like it. I was amazed at how well the visual flow was carried from slide to slide. The zooming approach Prezi takes through a presentation manages to be both original and captivating. PowerPoint contains over 50 different transitional animations, but all of these fall short to the single transition Prezi uses from slide to slide. Of course if you spend hours on the visual aspect of your presentation in PowerPoint something good will come out of it, but the knowledge and time required for this is simply too much when the same can be done in 5-10 minutes with limited knowledge in Prezi. Prezi is hard to describe in words but the video below should give you a good idea of how it works.

Ease of use is another factor Prezi capitalizes on strongly. It’s very easy to use, containing 6 simple features that allow you to create your Prezi without getting lost in confusion. These features are: write, show, colors& fonts, path, frame, and insert. PowerPoint, on the other hand, contains 8 different tabs that each expand into too many features to count. It’s not a bad thing as PowerPoint without doubt can be customized at a much higher level than Prezi. It is however far more difficult to use and master.

In a perfect world, I would end this review by telling you to stop using PowerPoint and switch to Prezi. Unfortunately, this is not the case. While most of this head-to-head review has been dedicated to how good Prezi is…it also contains a number of flaws which cannot be over looked.

For whatever reason, Prezi does not allow the user to click to the next slide. Instead, two arrows are displayed at the bottom right corner that allows the presenter to go either back to the previous slide or forward to the next one. This may seem like a minor issue when first considered, but I assure you it becomes incredibly annoying very quickly. When I am presenting something, I’m usually using the interactive whiteboard “Smart Board” in which I can conveniently go to the next slide tapping anywhere on the board (in PowerPoint). This is a missing feature in Prezi where I’m limited to tapping only in the bottom right hand corner. Furthermore, if the board isn’t perfectly calibrated, the bottom arrows don’t work at all.  Prezi is also missing a spell check...setting up the presenter for disastrous outcome. What’s more embarrassing than projecting a 100” slide that contains a spelling error? Will your audience continue to take you seriously after they spot it? Apparently the Prezi team has failed to consider this. When I personally used Prezi for my own presentations, I was forced to continuously copy and paste from Microsoft Word back to Prezi to make sure my presentation was error free.

While Prezi is indeed simple and easy to use, customization is extremely limited. Make no mistake about it, Prezi can’t do everything PowerPoint can. For every option I found in Prezi, PowerPoint branched this option off into 4 or 5 subcategories.

Prezi is still fairly new, and I expect many improvements from the development team in the future. Still, the flaws it currently contains are too much for me to pick it over PowerPoint.  I have to award the win to PowerPoint.