How to Give a Steve Jobs Caliber Keynote Presentation
Posted 04/02/2007 at 6:23am
| by Garrick Chow
Get to Know the Inspector
You won't get too far in Keynote without using the Inspector. The Inspector is where you establish the majority of settings for all your slides, graphics, text boxes, movies, links, and so on. Here's a mini-tour of each tab on the Inspector palette:
> Document: Lets you control the global settings of your presentation. You can force it to play upon Keynote's launch, to loop continuously, to restart after an idle period, and more. This is also where you can provide info on the presentation so Spotlight can find the file faster if you ever need to search for it. Selections made here apply to the entire presentation.
> Slide: Lets you control transitions and the appearance of slides. Changes made here affect just the slide currently selected.
> Build: Lets you create animations on your slides. For example, if you wanted to "build" a bar chart before your audience's eyes, you would control how that happens using the Build tab.
> Text: Lets you format text (including setting margins and alignment) throughout the presentation. This is not where you change fonts, however. That's done with the Font palette.
> Graphic: Lets you format a graphic (such as a chart or a table) or the graphic elements of text treatment, including changing shadows, opacity, and the width, color, and style of borders.
> Metrics: Lets you set an object's precise size and position. To maintain an object's correct width-to-height ratio, click the "Constrain proportions" checkbox.
> Table: Lets you change the number of rows and columns, and overall formatting, in a table.
> Chart: Lets you modify and customize charts using either the Axis or Series tabs.
> Hyperlink: Lets you format how hyperlinks display and behave in your presentation.
> QuickTime: Lets you control the behavior of audio and video files, which play via QuickTime.
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This how-to is extracted from Keynote 3 Essential Training with Garrick Chow, one of hundreds of training programs available from lynda.com. See www.lynda.com for the full training library.