For this week’s Prezi feature, we’re going to help you work on a tight schedule. Presentations can take a lot of effort, but you can still come up with original designs by following these 3 time-saving Prezi tips.
Living in a fast-moving environment, we often have a long list of tasks to finish by the end of the day. Those that require more attention become a lot harder to accomplish. As much as you’d want to focus most of your time preparing for a big presentation, there are plenty of other things you have to do. Sometimes, it’s just not realistic to aim for a perfect prezi.
Sure, great presentation design will take a lot of effort. But if you know how to play your cards right, you can create an amazing prezi in no time at all. The first thing you have to do is to decide on a concept for your design. It may sound like additional effort, but you will be able to work much faster once you know which direction to take your prezi. With a concept planned, the only thing left to worry about is arranging all the pieces together. You can do that easily with these time-saving Prezi tips:
Tip #1: Recycle old content
You don’t always have to start from scratch. One of the easiest ways to save time is to recycle your old content and design elements. Prezi allows you to build a library of frames and other items that you might want to use in future presentations. You can easily reuse your favorite content from prezis you’ve made in the past by taking advantage of the My Content feature.
Save your content for future use by selecting it and clicking on ‘Favorite’. You can also right-click on the content you want to save and choose ‘Add to Favorites’.
To access the stuff you’ve saved, just click on ‘Insert’ from the top menu and select ‘My Content’. From there, you can drag your content from the right sidebar and drop it right onto your canvas.
Another thing you can do is use slides from an old PowerPoint presentation. Import your PowerPoint into Prezi through the Insert menu. Select ‘PowerPoint’ and choose the slide deck you want to use. Drag and drop the slides individually or hold shift and double click to insert several slides at a time. On your canvas, these slides will work as frames.
If you want to separate elements within a frame, just click the options button and select ‘Remove Frame’ from the transformation tool.
Tip #2: Make use of templates and layouts
Another way you can save time is by taking advantage of templates and pre-set layouts. Prezi has a huge selection of templates that’s constantly updated, so you always have new visuals to choose from. You can always change up the theme and customize as you’d like. Add your own background or choose a different color palette to make it completely your own.
If you’d rather work on your own design, use layouts to skip worrying about arranging your frames and content. From the top menu, click ‘Insert’ and select ‘Layouts’. From the sidebar, you can choose from different single and multi-frame layouts.
Tip#3: Enable keyboard shortcuts
You can skip a few steps by using keyboard shortcuts as you work on your prezi. Click on the cog wheel icon in the top menu and enable shortcuts from there.
Refer to this list for a full guide on different editing and presenting shortcuts. Here are just a few that you might find useful:
- F – Draw frame, press again to change frame type (bracket, circle, rectangle or hidden)
- L – Load a file on your canvas (image, pdf, video, swf)
- S – Draw a shape, press again to change shape type (arrow, line, rectangle, circle, triangle)
- P – Go to Path mode
- 1 – Zoom in
- 2 – Zoom out
- CTRL + SHIFT + C – Opens the Prezi CSS editor
- CTRL + SHIFT + D – Duplicates and flips your content, creating a mirrored version of your content (works for images and arrows but not text)
- Esc (Escape key) – Finish current action or close open dialog
- Space – Enters Present mode
- Space then 0 – Enters Present Mode in fullscreen
Preparing for a presentation can really be stressful, but you can make it work if you take advantage of Prezi’s many helpful features. Come up with your own amazing designs in no time with these Prezi tips.
Featured Image: Death to the Stock Photo / Prezi logo via Wikimedia Commons
