Import PowerPoint to Prezi with Style: 10 Steps, 20 Minutes

Prezi offers a great function to simply import PowerPoint presentations. But if you want to do it with style, follow these 10 steps…

(Note: In this post, I have used my Cefora HRM Day PPT presentation on new ways of learning as the working example. Have a look at that first, then check out my finished Prezi presentation here – its simple, but nice.)

 

First of all, when you make your PowerPoint document to begin with, don’t forget to follow the basic rules:

• Build your presentation in 5 steps
• Follow these 9 PowerPoint essentials for real business people
• Turn horrible text driven PowerPoint slides into awesome big bold visual messages

You need to have a clear message, structure and content in your PowerPoint before you import to Prezi. If you have that, let’s get started!

 

Step 1: Start from a blank canvas

The purpose of this post is to show you how to easily create good visual style and good structure in your Prezi. So don’t pick a Prezi template when you start. Ignore all the templates and click on “blank”.

 

Step 2: Delete that first default Prezi frame

I mean the big circle frame. You don’t need it…

 

Step 3: Import your PowerPoint with “grid layout” template

The whole point of this post is that too many people are using the same Prezi standard layouts when they import their PowerPoints. Its not that they are bad, but chances are you are using Prezi instead of PowerPoint because you want to be original. And too many people have already used all those layouts.

With some small effort and the tips in this post, its easy to do SO MUCH BETTER. So ignore all the choices it offers:

• Using the “insert” button, choose “PowerPoint” and locate your file.
• Be patient with the upload, it takes a while…
• When the slides are shown on the right of the canvas, choose “insert all” at the top
• When presented with the different layouts possible, choose “grid layout” – this will give you the best overview of all your slides
• Keep the path between your slide for now
• Click the green arrow

 

Step 4: Move individual slides to bring a first structure to your presentation

Now you can see all your slides, you can apply some simple structure.

• Move your slides around on the canvas so that slide that go together are together – do this by dragging the frame around. Be careful not to change the size yet!
• If like me you have generic first slides (title slide, company template slide, agenda) get those out of the way for now…
• Use the canvas space freely at this point – we can fix that later

 

Step 5: Put some nice colourful frames around those groups of slides and name the sections/categories

Again, if you prepared your PowerPoint well, you probably know what these presentation sections/categories are all about. But your audience doesn’t, so you can name them now…

• Use the “add frame” function to put a frame around several of your slides – make it a solid frame
• Double click above the canvas near one of your sections/categories and add some text to name that section/category
• ..then drag the text into the new solid coloured frame
• Repeat per section until you have something like this – starting to look good !

 

Step 6: Add your new section/category frames to the pathway and put them in the “right” place.

That means:

• Click on “edit path”
• Click on each of your new frames so they are added to the path (navigation bar)
• Move the new frames to their correct position in the pathway. For example, if your first section/category is called “A” and consists of slides 1, 2, 3 put your “A” frame in front of 1, 2, 3. And if section/category “B”  consists of slides 4, 5, 6, put your “B” frame after “3” and before 4, 5, 6….

 

Step 7: Add a presentation title to your canvas

I am going to put all my content IN my core message. Its cool – you’ll see what I mean later, but first:

• Be sure you know what your message is. If you didn’t do that before you made your PowerPoint, you probably need some “Presentation Skills” training with me. 🙂
• Zoom out a little bit on your canvas and move to somewhere blank
• Double click somewhere on the canvas to add some big text
• Write the message title of your presentation

 

Step 8: Choose a nice template for your Prezi – one with good “hole-y” font styles

To achieve true style when you import your PowerPoint to Prezi, it would be good to have a font style that nicely lends itself to putting frames inside it. You are looking for something with holes in it, like I found in my example with the “pastel theme” subtitle font…

• Click on “template” and choose your template
• You can customise fonts if you want to
• Find a font that has some holes in it – in a minute, we are going to place our “slides” inside those holes….
• You will see that your “presentation title” (step 7) has now been updated to the new font
• ..and your section/category frames may have a different colour

 

Step 9: Place your section/category frames inside the text, rotating a little as necessary

As I said in my previous post on Prezi structure, it is important to use the different dimensions and rotation possibilities in the right way. I think that navigation within sub-parts of a Prezi presentation should be done gently and big structural changes can be more dramatic. To achieve what I did in my Prezi here, start by rotating some of those big solid section/category frames you made earlier to fit them into your text

• Have a look in your “presentation title” text for a nice place to put one of your big section/category frames
• Click on a frame
• Rotate it to align with a gap in the font
• Drag it to where you want in the text

 

Step 10: Nurse your individual frames to perfection and finalise your pathway

You will see that Prezi does some odd things to your original PowerPoint slides when it imports them onto the canvas and you will need to spend some time finishing up now. If you had an extremely simple PowerPoint (no objects, just text always the same size) then things will probably be OK. But if not, you may like me find that some objects are now in the background, text may have moved, shapes may be screwed-up… You will need to fix that now before you finalise your pathway. Here is a list of things I had to do:

• Put some text back in the foreground (right-click and “bring to front”)
• Delete some things that looked good in PowerPoint, but are terrible in Prezi – eg: my Excel-generated graph, which is now a completely different image
• Replace some PowerPoint objects with Prezi’s own objects – eg: the arrows on my graph

 

There is a lot more you COULD do to improve this Prezi – I added some fade-in effects and a little more pathway movement. And because my Prezi is for a long conference, I put the “presentation title” text in-between each section/category as a transition to remind us of the general point from time-to-time.

But I promised 10 steps and 20 minutes, so that’s it for now.

 

If you followed my steps, your Prezi will be far more original and stylish than all the other standard PowerPoint imported Prezis out there…

To close, here are 2 links for more information on some of the things I did above:

• Some tips from the prezi team, including foreground/background movement

• How to use Prezi templates

 

Good luck!

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