PowerPoint: Defining Mass media

If, like me, you’ve always had a sneaking liking for Prezi-style Presentations you’ll probably be aware that the only way to create them was, oddly-enough, by using Prezi.

Defining Mass Media: Prezi-Stylee

Which, in the past wasn’t too much of a problem because you could just use it to create whatever you liked for free.

But that was then.

And this is now.

Which means you’ve only got a couple of choices:

  • Either use the free (and very limited) version that only allows you to make 5 Presentations.
  • Or pay for the “educational version”, which, at £36 a year is quite steep for what you get. And, quite frankly, if you’ve got that kind of money sloshing around in your school / college kitty you could put it to much better use.
  • Or so they would have you believe.

    Because the 2019 version of PowerPoint has a neat little Zoom animation feature that allows you to create “Prezi-style” freeform narrative Presentations without having to shell-out for a Prezi-style subscription.

    Even better, you can pick-up the 2019 Home and Student edition of Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint and Excel) for £19.99 if you know where to look – which in this instance is SoftMall UK. You might, if you’re lucky, get stuff like OneNote, Outlook and Publisher thrown-in (although I can’t promise the latter – they were just included in a Microsoft promotion when I bought my copy and that may, or may not, have ended now).

    But back to the point of this post.

    Having (admittedly by accident) discovered the Zoom animation in my shiny new version of PowerPoint I thought I’d try using it to put together a slightly-different, for me at least, style of Presentation: one that focused a bit more on developing a broad narrative structure to a PowerPoint Presentation, as opposed to the more-usual “key point” linear structure I tend to favour.

    Movement around the Presentation is also slightly-unusual. While forward navigation uses (left-click) hyperlinks via the circular, labelled, graphics, you back-out of these by right-clicking. That is, a right mouse click will always take you back one slide.

    Since this is my first attempt it’s not quite there: the Presentation I’ve created (Defining Mass Media if you’re interested) still has a quasi-linear structure that uses a basic menu system (mainly because I decided to include a short video I made a few years back…).

    But it’s a start and I have a few ideas about how to make it “More-Prezi” and “Less-PowerPoint” that I might put into effect at some point if I can be bothered.

    I’ve made the Presentation available as a PowerPoint Show (.ppsx) self-running file because if you have an earlier version of PowerPoint it won’t run as a .pptx file (because these versions don’t have the Zoom animation function).

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