I think the zoom effects need to be handled with care, as they can become distracting as the view zooms past other slides. But does Prezi meet the needs of research presentations? Does it make it easier to convey multifaceted questions, methods, and results? Here’s one example of something Prezi does very well: it allows the presentation to zoom in on detailed figures without having them continuously occupy a lot of screen space. Prezi’s new interface makes all the style details easy to play around with. A big plus: it has a fairly basic but free-of-any-monetary-cost option. The platform has been around for about a decade now and has had plenty of time to smooth out its rough edges, though the interface still requires some acclimation. So much of a counterpoint to Ludus that it bills itself as “for people who aren’t designers”, Prezi is built around zooming in and out on a map of visuals. How about something entirely new? A new paradigm, perhaps? Or maybe you just want to include small animations, like in this acknowledgements slide? Here are a few. Keynote and LibreOffice Impress still follow the same PowerPoint philosophy.

Google Slides gets better all the time but has similar limitations. The standard protocol for demonstrating a live web site, for instance, is to open it in a browser. They seem to primarily address one of PowerPoint’s primary limitations: it never satisfactorily engineered a way to integrate all the types of audiovisual media a presenter may want to show. These are tools for in-person talks or webinars, as opposed to pre-recorded presentations. Instead, let’s look at a few alternatives to PowerPoint and its ilk. It’s certainly a compelling position but not one I’m going to dissect at the moment. I believe much of the argument comes down to “the focus of the presentation should be the presenter, not the slides”. These discussions have been conveyed elsewhere, years ago. I’m not going to get into the inherent limitations of slide presentations, especially now that we’ve progressed beyond the age of laser sound effects and transitions.

I’ve had a fair amount of musing/complaining about posters here lately, but what about the ubiquitous PowerPoint-style slide presentation? It’s just as much a linga franca of scientific communication as anything else, despite being conceptually identical to overhead transparencies of old.

Liveweb powerpoint 2019