Prezi killed my cat! An expert guide to Avoiding Death by Prezi Written by Russell Anderson-Williams Official Prezi Expert, Founder of The Prezenter Ltd (and Cat lover)
Š 2014 The Prezenter ltd
Official Prezi Expert The Prezenter is proud to be one of Prezi’s official independent experts. Prezi Experts are chosen for their expertise and their presentation design/training objectives, which align with Prezi’s core belief that sharing ideas should be fun and engaging.
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Contents
Page
So what is Death by Prezi? (And how did it kill a cat!)
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Part 1 of a short (and very sad) story
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How to Avoid Death by Prezi
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Step 1 - Plan your Prezi
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Step 2 - Getting the flavour right
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Step 3 - Building in layers
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Part 2 of a short (but happier) Story
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What else is there to know?
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Who is this book for? It doesn’t matter if you have created a hundred Prezis in the past or if you are just creating your first Prezi right now, this book has been written for existing Prezi users of all levels. The simple objective of this book is to help everyone avoid Death by Prezi. Oh and we just need to make it clear that no cats have ever been killed by a Prezi presentation, nor were any harmed in the writing of this book!
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A note from the author I would really like to thank every single person who has attended our Prezi training sessions over the last few years. Our objective is to train 10,000 new Prezi users by the year 2020 and we are well on our way to reaching that goal. There is another goal though that is even more important‌
Russell (aka The Prez enter)
‌To make sure that no one who attends our training, or reads our blogs and books ever creates a Death by Prezi presentation. Period. That is what led me to write this short book, and I also have to thank Jane who attended one of our training sessions recently and inspired the rather strange title. To everyone who sees Prezis potential and puts in the time to attend training, read books, and become a Prezi master, I salute you. 5
Forward Russell’s brilliant book highlights something that has always been a core motivation for why we started building Prezi: Creative thinking and helping people to see the big picture. To make a great prezi, you really have to think through your ideas and consider how they are related. You can use mind-mapping on paper, or in prezi, or on the wall, and any of these will help you see things clearly and articulate them effectively. Brainstorming your ideas in this way will also help you to arrive at a visually dynamic Prezi that will help your audiences remember and understand your content.
Adam Somlai-Fischer
Co-founder and Principal Artist at Prezi
Continued.... 6
It is exactly when you start to see the relationships between your ideas that you trigger new ones. When you start to see a connecting thread among the myriad of concepts, a great story is born. This visual thinking enables you to create the visual story that your audiences will resonate with. If you follow this book, will you be able to create compelling prezis that your audiences will love? Certainly. More than that, you’ll start to have new ideas, beautiful stories will be born, and you’ll be able to visualize them for your audience. It is exactly this which makes us proud and grateful to have built Prezi and to continue growing the amazing community of Prezi users.
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So what is death by Prezi? And how did it kill a cat! Ask a room of 20 people if they have seen Prezi yet and I guarantee that someone will say… …Ye that’s the presentation thingy that makes you feel motion sick. Anyone who says this has only ever seen a very badly designed Prezi or they have clicked through an hour long Prezi presentation in 30 seconds and wondered why they feel a bit ill. Death by Prezi is the overuse of Prezis zooming and rotating feature which leads to an audience of very green faces about to vomit in front of the presenter. This book is all about how to avoid it, and it starts with a very sad story about a business lady called Jane and her beloved cat Barry. 8
Part 1 of a short (and very sad) story
Meet Jane Jane is a very successful business lady. She works extremely hard to make sure that she was always ahead of the game and using innovative tools to improve her productivity, effectiveness, and impact in her job. Jane has worked her way up the corporate ladder and was often asked to give presentations at sales meetings and important new business pitches. She is a great presenter who always took the time to rehearse her presentations thoroughly. For that she had a great business partner who liked nothing more than to watch her presentation and give constructive feedback.
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Meet Barry Barry was an 8 year old cat that had lived with Jane his whole life. He realised how hard she worked to get where she was and made sure that she had all the praise and reward she deserved when returning home from a hard day at the office. He also felt a little responsible for her success as such a great presenter because he had sat through hundreds of hours of her Power Point presentations in the past and given really constructive feedback. If the presentation was to dull he’d simple fall asleep. If it was a really good one he’d sit up and pay attention, and probably purr at her feet on the final slide. ‘What a great team we make’ thought Barry. 11
The big pitch Jane had the most important presentation of her life coming up. It was for a new management role that had opened up in her business, and she had wanted this role for a long long time. ‘My presentation needs to be really innovative’ she thought to herself, and then did a quick Google search for new presentation tools. Of course she discovered Prezi at the top of that list, went to prezi.com and took a quick look at some Prezi presentations that other people had created. ‘Oh my god this is incredible’ she proclaimed. ‘Look at the movement and transitions from slide to slide. This will definitely wow them. That new job is mine’. 12
Getting started with Prezi Jane bought herself a Prezi Pro license, opened up the software and hit the NEW PREZI button. ‘It can’t be too difficult to learn’ thought Jane, and she began clicking around to see what all of those lovely buttons did. Before she knew it Jane had grasped the basics of inserting content into Prezi, and she even managed to link everything together with path points that gave her presentation a logical flow and order. ‘Right then, time to build my presentation for the interview’ she thought, looking rather smug with her new toy. ‘Barry is going to love this’. 13
The rehearsal Jane arrived home at the usual time, kicked off her shoes and told Barry to get ready for the best presentation he’ll of ever seen. His feedback was important to Jane. After so many years of tirelessly working towards this one job it was crucial that the presentation was right. Because of work commitments Jane had given up most of her friends, she wasn’t married, and found it difficult to date or meet someone to start a family with. But Barry was always there for her whenever she needed company. Jane plugged in her laptop to the TV and opened up her Prezi presentation whilst Barry sat in his usual spot and got ready to watch the show and give his feedback. 14
Let the show begin Jane made her Prezi full-screen and grabbed her wireless clicker. She began introducing her presentation and then very eagerly clicked to move onto Path point 2.
The presentation zoomed out to reveal a barrage of graphs and charts, images, video files, and text that were spread out far and wide across her screen, and all at different angles to one another. There were circles surrounding some content, brackets surrounding others. It looked very different to anything Barry had seen Jane deliver in the past. ‘Wow’ thought Barry, ‘that transition certainly grabbed my attention, I can’t wait to see what happens next’. Another click from Jane took them into the first area of content, and this is where the story gets quite upsetting.
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That dizzy feeling Jane carried on clicking through her Prezi, and she was delighted with her use of big zooms and rotations between each piece of content. ‘Oh look at his little head moving around following the screen, he’s really enjoying the presentation’ She thought to herself. This had gone on for 10 minutes now and Barry was starting to feel extremely dizzy and nauseous. ‘With all these big movements and transitions between content I’m concentrating more on not throwing up a fur ball than I am on Jane’s message’ thought Barry as his eyes glazed over.
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The end of Barry Jane came to her final summary and had one final trick up her sleeve to wow Barry. The final click zoomed out from a tiny point in the canvass and back to the overview of content that they had started with. As it zoomed back out though the whole screen rotated 180 degrees. ‘How cool is that’, She thought. As the rotation ended its spinning around, Barry’s head did not. His eyes kept rolling around in one direction whilst his head rotated in the other. ‘What’s happening to me’, thought Barry. It was then that Barry’s whole body fell sideways to the floor with all four legs straight out in front of him. Jane screamed ‘What’s happened…Barry… Nooooo…I think Prezi killed my cat.
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The harsh truth Jane looked up a local Prezi expert and brought Barry into The Prezenter teams office immediately. ‘Look what Prezi has done to my cat. They can’t get away with this. Is there something you can do?’ Jane shouted at the top of her voice. It was at that point that I put my arm around Jane. Told her my team will try to help Barry, and gave her the honest truth. ‘Jane it’s you who killed Barry, not Prezi. You didn’t think about your presentations content and message, and you got to carried away with all the zooming and spinning around. Let me show you how you could have saved Barry from this horrible tragedy in the first place okay?’ ‘Okay’ sniffed Jane through her tears, ‘Show me what I did wrong’.
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How to avoid ‘Death by Prezi’ To find out what happened to Barry the cat and to make sure you avoid creating a Death by Prezi presentation, click the link below and download the full version of this ebook.
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