34,79 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Prezi is a tool for delivering presentations in a linear or non-linear format. This cloud-based software enables users to structure presentations on an infinite canvass in a way that is much more engaging and visually stimulating to the audience.
"Mastering Prezi for Business Presentations" is a must read for anyone already using Prezi who wants to take their presentations to the next level. It covers all of the technical elements of the software, whilst also looking at the practicalities of using Prezi in a business environment.
This book covers all the technical elements of Prezi and also teaches the reader how to think for Prezi, and approach their design in the best way. This is an essential resource for people who want to use Prezi seriously.
As well as covering best practices for inserting imagery, sound, and video, this book also covers topics for business users like collaborating and sharing Prezis online, using Prezi at a meeting to brain storm with overseas colleagues, and how to 'Prezify' PowerPoint or Keynote slides.
"Mastering Prezi for Business Presentations" will escalate you from Prezi user to master with ease.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 249
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
Ähnliche
Mastering Prezi for Business Presentations
Mastering Prezi for Business Presentations
Copyright © 2012 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: July 2012
Production Reference: 1170712
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
Livery Place
35 Livery Street
Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-84969-302-8
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by John M. Quick ( <[email protected]> )
Credits
Author
Russell Anderson-Williams
Reviewers
Ned Potter
Mikah J. Pritchard
Acquisition Editor
Usha Iyer
Lead Technical Editor
Pramila Balan
Technical Editor
Vrinda Amberkar
Project Coordinator
Michelle Quadros
Proofreader
Lynda Sliwoski
Indexer
Hemangini Bari
Graphics
Valentina D'Silva
Manu Joseph
Production Coordinator
Prachali Bhiwandkar
Cover Work
Prachali Bhiwandkar
About the Author
RussellAnderson-Williams is the founder of www.theprezenter.com, which is dedicated to educating Prezi users in best practice, sharing advice, tips in design, and more than anything, changing the mindset of Prezi users to that of a non-linear thinker. A creative and visual thinker, Russell has a strong background in visual communication and graphic design, as well as a long career in training and education. Russell has designed and delivered hundreds of visually stimulating training presentations for some of the world's biggest companies in a variety of sectors. By merging his love and passion for educating people with his joy for all things wonderfully visual he has set a course to turn anyone in the business world into a Prezi master through his onsite training programs, and tirelessly blogging about everything Prezi related. He resides in the extremely creative city of Bristol in the United Kingdom where he works in training design, Prezi design and training, and anything else that allows his creativity to run wild.
Acknowledgement
I'd like to thank Packt Publishing for their support and guidance in what at first seemed like a huge challenge. They made it a very easy journey, so thanks to one and all.
I also want to thank the team at Prezi, Peter Arvai (Founder, CEO), Adam Somlai-Fischer (Founder, Head of Design), Drew Banks (Head of Marketing), and Zoli Radnai (Community Manager), for your support and appreciation of what I'm trying to do. The same goes for every single Prezi employee who works tirelessly to bring the world an incredible product. You guys really are going to change the world by making information more engaging and easier to digest. Thank you!
My biggest thanks has to go out to my wife Natalie (a self-confessed non-creative) for having the patience to put up with my crazy creative ramblings that probably made no sense to her at all. Thank you darling for always taking the time to listen and also keeping me grounded when I get a little too carried away with my ideas. You're the best.
About the Reviewers
NedPotter is an Academic Librarian in the UK, at the University of York. As an information professional he has won various awards, including being named a Mover & Shaker by Library Journal in the "Marketing" category. He is the author of Library Marketing Toolkit, published in 2012.
Ned teaches at classes, and presents and writes on emerging technologies and marketing. He is a member of the Prezi Pioneer program and has produced extremely popular online guides to the platform, endorsed and promoted by Prezi themselves. He can be found online at www.thewikiman.org, or you can access his Prezi page via http://bit.ly/howtoprezi.
MikahPritchard holds a B.S. in Psychology from Oakland City University. She is currently pursuing M.S. Ed. in Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University. She has had an interest in Educational Psychology and Education Studies throughout her academic and professional career, which has involved the work in graphic design, online instructional materials, and non-traditional student education, including adult learners. Combining her passions of technology and educational psychology in her current position, Mikah works as an Instructional Technologist at DePauw University.
www.PacktPub.com
Support files, eBooks, discount offers and more
You might want to visit www.PacktPub.com for support files and downloads related to your book.
Did you know that Packt offers eBook versions of every book published, with PDF and ePub files available? You can upgrade to the eBook version at www.PacktPub.com and as a print book customer, you are entitled to a discount on the eBook copy. Get in touch with us at <[email protected]> for more details.
At www.PacktPub.com, you can also read a collection of free technical articles, sign up for a range of free newsletters and receive exclusive discounts and offers on Packt books and eBooks.
http://PacktLib.PacktPub.com
Do you need instant solutions to your IT questions? PacktLib is Packt's online digital book library. Here, you can access, read and search across Packt's entire library of books.
Why Subscribe?
Free Access for Packt account holders
If you have an account with Packt at www.PacktPub.com, you can use this to access PacktLib today and view nine entirely free books. Simply use your login credentials for immediate access.
This book is dedicated to anyone in business who fights every day to inject a little more creativity into their world. For anyone who's sat through hundreds of hours of tireless slides over the last few decades and wants something new. For everyone in business who understands that it's not always what you say, but how you say it. This book is for all of you. Keep fighting the good fight and never do anything just because that's how it's always been done!
--Russell Anderson-WilliamsPreface
If you've discovered Prezi in the last few years or even very recently, you have joined part of an interesting movement that's rapidly changing how ideas are shared. If you're reading this now then there's no doubt in our minds you're completely sold on the fact that business presentations need to change. You're probably also sold on the fact that Prezi is exactly what's needed to make that change. In this book you'll find all the tools and guidance to take your business presentations to the next level, and build on what you already know about Prezi. Our aim is to take you from Prezi user to Prezi master, and we hope you enjoy the ride.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Best Practices with Imagery, will show two different types of imagery. It will help you understand the pros and cons of using either within the Prezi canvas. There are also useful tips on where to find imagery for your Prezi designs and how to create some of your own.
Chapter 2, Using Audio, teaches you how to add audio to your canvas and understand when this technique should and shouldn't be used. Audio can bring a whole new dimension to your Prezi designs. It will also make your Prezi very engaging for anyone viewing it online.
Chapter 3, Inserting a Video, explores the benefits of using video files that are stored offline or online. We will also look at how to create your own YouTube account to edit and manage your online video files.
Chapter 4, Approaching Your Prezi Design, will help you understand the most logical and time-saving way to approach your Prezi design. You'll see exactly why Mind Mapping and planning your Prezis are so important, and you'll also learn the three Prezi design steps to help you build perfect Prezis every time.
Chapter 5, Projecting Your Prezi, gives you some simple facts about projectors that you probably never knew before. With this new knowledge you'll understand why some of your Prezi designs don't look the same once projected onto a big screen. This is an extremely useful chapter that will help keep each and every frame of your Prezi design looking great.
Chapter 6, Prezis for Online Delivery, gives you some simple tips to help engage with your audience and keep them focused when exploring a Prezi on their own. Some of your Prezis will be accessed by colleagues and customers online. Because of this you'll need to take a slightly different approach and think about your audience a lot more.
Chapter 7, Importing Slides into Prezi, helps you understand the Insert PPT feature, and also gives great tips on how to truly turn linear slides into non-linear presentations. With PowerPoint being so dominant in business presentations for such a long time there's no doubt you'll need to Prezify slides for your organization.
Chapter 8, Prezi for iPad and Android, explains how to use the Prezi viewer for iPad, and also gives great advice on how to present using a tablet device. If you use an iPad or Android tablet for business, then why not use it to present new ideas to your colleagues and managers at work?
Chapter 9, Mastering the Newer Prezi Features, will help you master some of the newest Prezi features available as the Prezi software is improving all the time. In this chapter, you will learn how to make the most out of templates, customize shapes, group objects together, and much more.
Chapter 10, Prezi Meeting, will enable you and your colleagues to share ideas in an exciting and engaging way using Prezi Meeting. There are lots of step-by-step instructions on how to set up a meeting, and also useful tips to make sure the meetings you host stay focused and have meaning.
Chapter 11, Getting Prezi through the Door, explores some of the barriers you may face when introducing Prezi to your business. This is going to be just as hard as mastering the tool itself, but we've given you lots of useful tips to help get Prezi through the door and into the hands of your colleagues.
What you need for this book
So long as you've used the Prezi software to build at least one presentation, and have a basic understanding and appreciation of what it can do, you'll be able to benefit from this book.
Who this book is for
This book is for anyone in business that already uses Prezi and wants to take their skills to the next level. Even if you have only just grasped the basics of Prezi, this book will help you think, plan, approach, and build Prezis that engage and inspire your colleagues and customers like never before.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "This will save your movie as a Windows Media Video (.wmv) file."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Always click on the Advanced Image Search option to the right of the screen and fine-tune your search before selecting an image."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
Reader feedback
Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or may have disliked. Reader feedback is important for us to develop titles that you really get the most out of.
To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to <[email protected]>, and mention the book title through the subject of your message.
If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.
Customer support
Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.
Errata
Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in the text or the code—we would be grateful if you would report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/support, selecting your book, clicking on the erratasubmissionform link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded to our website, or added to any list of existing errata, under the Errata section of that title.
Piracy
Piracy of copyright material on the Internet is an ongoing problem across all media. At Packt, we take the protection of our copyright and licenses very seriously. If you come across any illegal copies of our works, in any form, on the Internet, please provide us with the location address or website name immediately so that we can pursue a remedy.
Please contact us at <[email protected]> with a link to the suspected pirated material.
We appreciate your help in protecting our authors, and our ability to bring you valuable content.
Questions
You can contact us at <[email protected]> if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.
Chapter 1. Best Practices with Imagery
First and foremost, Prezi is a tool for storytelling. If an image really can say a thousand words, then it's crucial that you use the right kind of imagery in Prezi to deliver your message in the most powerful way possible.
In this chapter we will explore two different kinds of imagery, and look at how Prezi copes with each. You'll also get some advanced tips on how to create your own imagery that works well with Prezi. By the end of the chapter you will understand the benefits of using certain types of imagery within your Prezi, and be well on the way to mastering this element of your Prezi designs. In this chapter, we cover:
Raster and vector images
You may not have come across the terms raster and vector before but they are used to describe two different types of imagery. If you've been building presentations for a while in Prezi or another piece of software, the chances are you've scanned through hundreds and hundreds of raster and vector images without even realizing it. After all, why would you need to know these terms? All you need is to make great presentations for your business, right?
While we totally agree that you don't need to be a professor of the arts to build great presentations, we do believe that knowing the difference between your raster and vector imagery will benefit you massively and help you become a true master of Prezi.
We hope you'll agree that the best Prezis are always the ones that have obviously been planned very well from the start. If you're a reader of my blog, then you'll know that I love to preach about the importance of planning before you even touch the Prezi software. A part of that early planning should be deciding what type of imagery you're going to use, and if there is a particular style you want your Prezi to have. You might also want your Prezi to be small in file size, which is another reason why choosing the right imagery will help.
Let's explore raster and vector imagery together and you can make up your own mind as to which would be right for you and your Prezis.
What are raster images?
A raster image is simply an image made up of tiny pixels of color. Depending on the size of the image there will be hundreds, or even thousands of different pixels placed together in the right way to form the image you see.
In the following raster image, you can see that at normal size it looks great, and there is lots of different shading. However, the right-hand side shows that when you zoom into this image using Prezi, you will start to see the individual pixels that make up the shaded areas. This degrades the quality of the image when viewed at this size.
The preceding image has been saved as a PNG (Portable Network Graphics) file using the much loved Adobe Photoshop.
Some other raster graphics editors you could use to create raster images are:
Note
All of the preceding raster graphics editors have their own advantages over one another, so I'd recommend you take 15 minutes out of your day to research them and see which one you would prefer.
Raster file formats
I mentioned that the example image shown previously was saved as a PNG file which is one of the formats Prezi will accept through the insert image menu option. You probably know already that Prezi will also accept JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group), GIF (Graphics Interchange Format), and, PDF (Portable Document Format) images, "but what do these different files mean?" I hear you shout!
Raster formats within Prezi
File format
Uses
Tips
.jpeg
Uses 16 million colors, so it is perfect for photographs and images with lots of shading.
Compression can be adjusted so you decide the trade-off between image size and quality.
.gif
Great at compressing images that have large blocks of the same color, that is, logos or shapes. Also supports transparency.
Avoid using this format for photographs and images with shading.
.png
Has many of the same qualities as .gif but compresses images in a much better way.
Supports transparency which is extremely useful in Prezi when overlaying images.
This format preserves all visual elements within the file and compresses the file size very effectively. This format is useful when importing PowerPoint slides. This is discussed later in Chapter 7, Importing Slides into Prezi.
Prezi desktop player will need to convert the PDF files so an Internet connection is needed for this.
What are vector images?
Vector images are not made up of pixels like raster images, but instead they are created using points, lines, curves, and shapes to represent a computer graphic. They use mathematical functions to determine where everything sits in the image.
All of this sounds very technical, doesn't it? Here's what you really need to know about vector images to determine whether or not you'll use them in your Prezis.
The preceding image has been created in Adobe Illustrator and saved as a PDF file. You can clearly see in the zoomed section on the right that there is absolutely no loss of image quality. I'll come back to this point later, but hopefully you've just had one of those nice "ahah" moments!
You can probably tell by now that I'm a big fan of Adobe products, but I do appreciate that there are other (less expensive) pieces of software for working with vector images. Here are a few you should look into:
Note
Later in this chapter, I'll show you how to create your own vector images using Inkscape. Keep reading though because there's more you need to know before you get to that stage.
Vector file formats
Vector graphic editors like the ones mentioned previously will allow you to export your images in many different file types. The only ones that matter to us though are PDF and SWF (Small Web Format) because these are the only two file types that can handle vector images and are supported by Prezi. The following table gives a quick explanation of each file format along with some tips on using them in Prezi.
Vector formats within Prezi
File format
Uses
Tips
This format preserves all visual elements within the file and compresses the file size very effectively.
Prezi desktop player will need to convert .pdf files, so, an Internet connection is needed for this.
.swf
Very fast loading format with excellent compression for small file size. Also supports animation (if you know how!)
Supports transparency like .png and .gif files, so, is very useful in Prezi.
Note
I should state that PDF is not strictly a vector file format, but exporting vector images to this format preserves the image details for inserting into Prezi. This means that you won't get any pixilation like that of a raster image.
What are the benefits of Prezi?
I hope you're now starting to understand the roles that these two very important image types play in getting your Prezi looking great and loading fast.
This book is all about you mastering Prezi, so, it's vital that you understand the impact that everything explained so far has on your Prezi designs.
Imagery Types
Benefits in Prezi
Drawbacks in Prezi
Raster
(.jpg ,.gif ,.png)
There are literally thousands of imagery types available to you online so with some patience you should be able to find some great imagery for your Prezi. Most raster images will be photographs which give more life to your Prezi. Zooming in and out of detail is very effective when using raster images saved at a high resolution.
You can use Prezis built-in Google search to quickly find raster images.
It's difficult to find lots of raster imagery in the same consistent style unless you pay for it from an online library.
Zooming in too close to raster imagery will cause pixilation in Prezi.
Big raster images can be slow to load when users first open a Prezi. Lots of raster images in Prezi will mean a larger file size for your presentation.
Vector
(.swf, .pdf)
Vector images will always have good compression so file size is extremely small.
You'll be able to zoom into a vector image without any loss of quality or pixilation.
Vector images are scalable so enlarging them will not affect the quality of the image at all.
It is possible to take a raster image and "vectorise" it to get all of the benefits mentioned previously.
Quality vector images will not show up in the Prezi image search feature detailed.
Vector images do not look like real life photographs, and this can sometimes be a distraction to anyone viewing your Prezi.
Note
I am hoping that by now you have started to understand the benefits listed previously, and may be in favor of either raster or vector. If not, then keep on reading and I'm sure you'll come to a conclusion very soon.
Where can you find great imagery?
One thing we all struggle with when creating presentations is finding the right image to deliver our message. You know exactly what you want to say, and if you could just find the right image to accompany your words, then your whole presentation will have a much bigger impact on its audience.
The problem is, of course, that we all have tight (and usually unrealistic) deadlines to meet, and we are probably trying to work on several different projects at once. There isn't enough time in the day to spend it looking at images, but you do want your Prezi to look great.
