Advice on structuring a presentation

I took a look - Prezi is very nice, and almost exactly what I am looking for. However I get the feeling that it is not formal enough for what I want.

You mention Keynote, so you're probably on OS X. If you have access to a Windows box, you might look at http://www.officelabs.com/projects/pptPlex/Pages/default.aspx.

You might want to look into upgrading to xmind pro, if you don't already have it. I think it is $50/year. It has some more advanced presentation features and lets you export maps to powerpoint and PDF.

http://prezi.com/ is the best bet for working with a graph or mindmap like structures. The problem is, presentations are a linear narrative, like most good forms of storytelling are. Many people insist "my presentation is so amazing and complex it has to be non-linear" and the results are nearly always awful. > I'm working on a complex and long presentation of a research project This phrase alone suggests you might be insisting on being comprehensive, despite the fact your audience almost certainly doesn't want long, and only wants complex provided they're interested enough to warrant it - something they'll decide in the first few minutes of your talk. The best exercise in the world for this is to force yourself to do a short 3 or 4 minute talk on your topic without a single slide. Only after you've done the work to think about your project concisely enough to achieve this (an elevator pitch if you will) will you have a suitably clear perspective on how to present your ideas in a longer form. Nearly every Prezi presentation I've seen is entirely distracting, because the speaker got lost in their fascination with their own ideas and their own interest in playing with the whizzy elements of the tool, instead of focusing intently on why the audience is there, what they want to know and what kinds of facts, ideas or new questions the audience came to the presentation hoping to leave with.

Thanks Berkun, I appreciate your advice and am reflecting upon it.

http://vue.tufts.edu/, a free mind-mapping application developed by Tufts University, has presentation features like playback-pathways (http://vue.tufts.edu/features/index.cfm).