The most common presentation software, Microsoft Powerpoint, has remained largely unchanged for the past two decades, and has several well-known drawbacks that impede the ability of presenters to tell their story to the audience.  Fortunately, a new generation of presentation software has recently been developed.  Below I’ve highlighted a several innovative presentation tools designed to promote dialogue,  introduce real-time data into presentations, and foster collaboration between people creating presentations.

Presentation Structure

Powerpoint forces the presenter to present to the audience in a linear format.  The problem with a linear format is that many concepts require multiple dimensions  to display the interconnected nature of the subject matter.  Enter Prezi, a new presentation software to create a ‘spacial narrative’ that not only allows for a 2 or 3 dimensional presentation flow and visualization, but also allows the presenter to stop at any point, and ‘zoom’ to any portion of the overall presentation.  Prezi is especially great for more interactive, discussion based meetings, or for subject matter that does not have a distinctly linear format.   Links to some great ‘sample’ Prezi presentations are provided below.

Real Time Data

A blog article from the Harvard Business Review website called “Presentation Tools That Go Beyond ‘Next Slide Please'” by Nolan Browne notes that ‘presentation tools have largely been static, creating an artificial boundary between the presentation and the outside world.”  Power point slides are great for capturing the state of things at a particular moment in time, similar to how a balance sheet captures the financial situation of a company at the end of a quarter. For presentations that touch on subject matter that is constantly changing, this can cause a lot of extra work in changing the content, or require that the presenter present out of date information.  Several new tools are working to help bring real-time data into presentations.  Zoho Show, a component of Zoho Docs, an online suite of productivity tools similar to Microsoft Office, allows users to insert live media and data from a variety of online sources directly into a presentation.

Collaboration

Powerpoint impedes collaboration in several ways.  First, its difficult to collaborate with others when creating a new presentation.  Presenters either have to create slides separately, and then splice them together to create a whole presentation.  This method usually leads to a presentation with an uneven flow due to differences in writing, style, format etc. of the different presenters slides.  Alternatively, presenters either have to meet in real time to create the presentations, or email revisions back and forth, which can be difficult to manage.  Online collaboration tools like Dropbox and Google Drive help with this issue by creating a centralized document that the presenters can share.

Powerpoint also inhibits in-meeting collaboration between those in the meeting.  For example, if a presenter would like to collaborate with the meeting participants during the presentation to edit a graph, they either need to use the cumbersome and slow feature to imbed an excel plot within Powerpoint, or open up a separate excel file.  A new program called Plotly allows users to create interactive graphs that foster collaboration and discussion about the data.  Google Drive allows multiple users to use a single document at one time, and shows where each users cursor is on the document so that each participant can keep track of where the other users are concentrating.

Here are several sample Prezi presentations.  My goal for this MP course is to create at least one Prezi presentation for my job and gather the meeting participants feedback on the experience.

Source:

Browne, Nolan. “Presentation Tools That Go Beyond “Next Slide Please””Harvard Business Review. N.p., 24 Apr. 2014. Web. 12 July 2014.