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While recently exploring prezi I realized there have to be better tools than PowerPoint for presenting something, especially technical stuff. What differentiates technical stuff from other stuff in my opinion is the support of these features:

  • be able to insert large code fragments
  • scroll in code fragments
  • annotate (highlight) text/code easily
  • have several "steps", ie. on pressing a key, something is highlighted, displayed, moved, etc. (this is missing in prezi)
  • include images with dynamic sources (eg. to include yuml diagrams)

Here is a great overview of alternatives, has anybody evaluated some?

Todd Main
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Ice09
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  • Better than powerpoint?! I can't believe that – Chris S Nov 11 '09 at 13:34
  • I think if you are including a lot of code in your presentation you should switch displaying the IDE and the slides. Moreover, including a lot of code could be a bad idea depending on your audience. Finally: Yes, Prezi is a great tool. – JuanZe Feb 04 '10 at 18:00

4 Answers4

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I have been presenting technical jargon for over 20 years (closer to 30) and I currently use a combination of Prezi, PowerPoint, and Camtasia. If this is a presentation that I am giving live, Prezi will be my shell. I will drop simple graphics directly into Prezi as images. More complex bullets, images requiring arrows and circles, etc. will be PowerPoint slides which I have saved (to import into the Prezi shell). And for highlighting code or text, I will bring PowerPoint slides up on my screen and record the screen with Camtasia... record my mouse highlighting code, annotating, zooming etc., and create small movie files that I'll bring into the Prezi shell. Once everything is in Prezi, I download it to my laptop and I'm ready to present. I might even screen record the entire Prezi (with Camtasia) and create a narrative sound file (using Audacity) that I will lay into the recorded presentation video. In this way, if there is a disaster (my flight is delayed; hangover, etc.) I can provide the audience a link to YouTube where they can watch my entire presentation in my absence. (It never hurts to sport your photo in your opening in the event that for whatever reason you're not there to present live.)

eguy-harley
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I would say prezi! Especially because how you can show your code on it (as you already mentioned, and I don't really know any other presentation stuff who can do anything similar)

There's an interview with Facebook engineer Brian Shire about prezi

And some discussion on blogs about it.

See here and some ideas on how to use prezi here

Also techcrunch speaking about prezi

Diego Dias
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  • Yes, I really like prezi a lot, however it is a little "too fancy" for in-house presentations (the moving and zooming stuff), but that's not a problem. However, what I am really missing is some kind of "linearity" (which is probably intentionally left out), eg. having a picture/text and being able to highlight parts of it on key events - one thing at a time. My presentation style seems to be a little too linear for prezi. – Ice09 Nov 12 '09 at 09:11
  • I think almost like you. That's why I posted a link of possible uses of prezi. I don't think it would be "the one presentation tool"... :) Although it is a really good tool, I think PowerPoint is still the best tool for most of the presentations – Diego Dias Nov 12 '09 at 12:29
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    And if you want to be really fancy (if you know how to program in javascript), you can do a Prezi-styled presentation via [impress.js](http://bartaz.github.com/impress.js/). – auroranil Feb 25 '12 at 06:58
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I was a fan of LaTeX Beamer for quite a while as it was pretty easy to write code with highlight, place annotations, perform progressive disclosure for better understanding, etc.

However, despite recognizing that Beamer was better for some tasks, namely when the presentation had to focus on code, currently I mainly use Powerpoint more because:

  • I saw this quote somewhere in Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information where someone said that PowerPoint presentations were usually better than LaTeX ones because people would put less math in them (since it was harder to do good equations). The same principle applies to code most of the times...
  • Doing stuff using PowerPoint is, despite its many drawbacks, usually faster and easier for me and would make it trivial for any of my peers to review and edit the presentation.

Anyway I'll surely take a look at that list of tools that you provided since sticking with what you already know is the true recipe for getting old :)

Miguel Ventura
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  • For usual presentations I also like Powerpoint (I could use any presentation tool for this since I am using maybe 10% of the features) - but for explaning sources, Powerpoint is just not good, since some zoom in/out and scrolling functionality is missing (which are provided eg. by prezi). – Ice09 Nov 12 '09 at 09:06
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I recommend PresentationTube. PresentationTube offers a PowerPoint presentation recorder and video sharing network to help teachers, students and business professionals produce and share presentations in video format. The recorder allows the presenter to narrate PowerPoint slides and synchronize a variety of visual aids, including presenter's audio video footage, whiteboard, drawing board, and web content. PresentationTube integrates scrollable slide thumbnails allowing the audience to move to the respective video content and control both the time and progress of video presentation.

Alaa Sadik
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