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by Karen Newcombe

Yes, I said spiffy. With Prezi you can create flowing, organic feeling presentations that shed the linear, monotonous feel of most slide decks. A good Prezi can give the impression that you're flying through the information. Where the traditional slide deck is usually linear in nature, they have managed to make Prezi feel free-form and airy.

You can clearly demonstrate hierarchies of information with imaginative graphics, and you can zoom in on tiny details to show them full-screen. It's a bit difficult to explain, so I urge you to check out their "Getting Started" video to see what the thing looks like.  

A presentation is often (usually!) made memorable by understanding what to leave out, by a focus on what's really important, and by the ability of the speaker to tell his or her story. The story is the most important thing, and the proper role of slides is to illustrate that story. 

Prezi offers a tool that helps you make those illustrations into beautiful, living images that can aid your storytelling abilities without offering the complete distraction and interruption that a video causes. 

Check out their video, and give the software a spin.