Structuring your presentation will help you engage your audience, tell a story, and get to the final product faster. Here’s our quick-start guide to get you started.
Remember that good presentations are conversational and tell a story, so set everything up with that in mind. |
Elements of a presentation’s structure
Whatever program you’re using, every presentation is structured using elements like slides and images. In Prezi, we take it a step further and give you more options to build with. Let's review what the main ones you’ll use are.
The Overview
The Overview is the big picture of your presentation. It can contain everything else in your presentation, or just reveal a larger part. You can change the size of the Overview at any time by dragging out from a corner with your mouse.
Use the Overview like a home base that you take your audience back to for context. Connect different frames and topics together, or use the background so the audience always knows where they are in the presentation.
If it fits the flow of your presentation, you can zoom out from a frame or topic back to the overview before continuing to help your audience.
Frames
Frames are the best way to direct your audience, reveal information, and organize your presentation. You can think of them as shots in a movie, or windows where you show your audience what you want.
Because they are focus areas, they’re the main tool for structuring your presentation.
Try placing your content around the canvas in whatever way you like. Then, as you start organizing your ideas, bring in frames to focus attention and break down the content. This process of organizing and framing is the basic way to create presentations using Prezi.
Once you have a few pieces of content with frames around them, you can use them to their full potential by adding animations, zooming in or out, and more.
One of the best ways to use frames is to dive deeper into a topic with progressive zooms. Consider what information your audience should have and when for the biggest impact and best-looking presentation.
Topics
Topics are best for organizing detailed parts of the presentation that you only want to dive into as your audience asks about them. You can think of them as hidden frames with built in zoom animations. There are two types of topics: Planets and Pages. Each topic type helps you present content in a distinct way.
Planets
Planets have subtopics that orbit the main idea and are best used to separate related content. Use this type if you want to break your topic up into subtopics, jump to different areas of your content, or give your audience a preview of your main ideas for better orientation.
Pages
Pages contain slides of content that display in a linear fashion. Use this type if you want to reveal content to your audience step by step. When you present with a page topic, each page will display separately and in order. The left sidebar shows the number of pages in the stack and the order they will appear.
Ordering your presentation
The path your presentation will take can always be seen using the Timeline on the left side of the editor. Here, your presentation is broken down into steps that can easily be shuffled around and edited.
By default, presentation steps are organized in the order you add them. This means that a new frame you insert will always go to the bottom of the timeline, for instance. You can quickly move it to another step by selecting and dragging that step in the timeline.
Setting a path for topics
You can set a default path for your topics and subtopics and determine whether you zoom out to the overview between topics or go straight to the next topic and whether you return to the main topic between subtopics or zoom into the next subtopic immediately. To learn more, please check this article.