A better Powerpoint?

PPT annoys me- it's a useful program in a lot of ways, but it's just so bloody ugly and annoying. If you have a bunch of photos/graphs and some text to show it's a pretty decent tool, but it's very linear at the core, making people go through hoops if they want to jump around in a presentation rather than follow along.

So when my boss showed me Prezi I was instantly interested. At the core it's basically a presentation graphics program, but set up somewhat differently. There's only one slide- you can include text, graphics, video and the like on the slide in any arrangement. You can define a path to follow where the program will follow along, PPT like, or you can jump back and forth by zooming in and out and clicking on what you want. Prezi autoscales as you click- you can "hide" pictures and text by making them too small to see on the overview and then have them appear/vanish through zoom. There's some nice zooming/rotation animations, although I'm still not a believer in funky slide changes- it distracts from the content.

I really like the freeform setup of the content. Imagine you have a talk with three distinct threads. You can set them up at 0, 120 and 240 degrees and make it instantly clear how your talk is organized. it works equally well in "bush/tree" form where you start with a concept and expand out from that through multiple layers, each with an option. You basically build your talk's overview within the program automatically.

It's still clearly an early beta- it's missing a lot of stuff like user-defined text styles, the help is barely there and bugs abound, but that's not exactly unusual for Web 2.0 apps. There's an offline viewer so you can package up your content and use it in the boonies, and you can either get the free version or pay for more storage. I'm going to be very interested to see how this goes.