Common Prezi mistakes

Now that you're starting to think in the Prezi frame of mind, you'll be able to pull together some of these strategies to start creating your own BIG picture Prezis. Before you do so, we have one last note of caution. It's incredibly easy to get carried away by excitement with some of the awesome Prezi tools at your disposal. We inevitably see some of these things popping up during every Prezi training session. If you can avoid these common mistakes, you'll be one step closer to becoming a Prezi master.

Motion sickness

One of the biggest attractions to Prezi is the zooming and spinning that happens when transitioning from one element to another. This movement is so smooth and fluent that it's normally the first thing to make people sit up straight and say Wow this is great, how do you do that?

The danger with this is that people then go off and create their own Prezi with as many spins and zooms as they can because they think it looks so great that their presentation is bound to be talked about for ages by their colleagues.

Their Prezi will only be talked about for one reason, and that's because after 20 minutes of all the spinning and zooming, people had to leave the room because they fell ill. Especially when viewed on large screens, this extreme use of zooming and spinning has been known to literally cause actual motion sickness.

The spins and zooms you can create in Prezi can be very useful in helping you to tell your story, especially if used cleverly by slowly revealing words or zooming in to find hidden details, as we discussed earlier. On their own, they have no impact at all and do not help the audience retain any information.

Tip

Don't rely on the zoom to tell your story. You, your content, and some subtle clever use of Prezi will do that, not a 360 degree rotation between each key point!

The blank canvas challenge

Staring at a blank canvas can be much more intimidating than a blank slide. Precisely because there is more freedom, there is also much more to consider. When you're sitting there with the blank canvas staring back at you, it can be easy to resort to a style with which you're more comfortable. We've seen too many new Prezi users to count who have performed either of the following actions:

• Resorted back to laying out their presentation exactly as if it were a PowerPoint.
• Just started placing text and images randomly across the canvas, with no plan.

In the first scenario, you're falling back into a linear way of thinking, and not taking advantage of the additional opportunities afforded by the Prezi platform. In the second, it's easy to think you're designing a great nonlinear presentation, but without a solid plan, you end up zooming, panning, and rotating around the screen for no good reason. Many people who claim they don't like Prezi have only seen it used in these ways.

Tip

Don't even open the Prezi canvas until you have a plan ready. This will help ensure you're not overwhelmed or distracted by staring at the blank canvas.

Going too big

It's easy to get so excited about the new presenting opportunities afforded by Prezi that you want to make use of every single one of them and create the single best presentation in all of history. Slow down, though.

That may happen in time, but if you're creating your first business presentations, it's much better to keep things simple in the beginning. Use some of the features you're most comfortable with first. Your Prezi will look much better if it uses one Prezi design strategy well, rather than many of them poorly. Keep it simple and expand to try new things as and when you're comfortable with them.