How to really use Apple’s Keynote to build killer presentations.

Keynote ’08 is a true champ for creating slick slideshows that will captivate an audience. On the surface, Keynote is as easy to use as anyone could ever want, but under the hood, there are some subtle techniques for teaching the app a few new tricks and maximizing the time you spend building compelling presentations. And while you can certainly use PowerPoint to make your case, the fact is that Keynote has a slew of lovely effects and powerful interactive features that allow you to create highly sophisticated, graphically advanced shows that make PowerPoint look a little long in the tooth. So let’s take a tour of some of the cooler aspects of Keynote and learn about some of the hidden features and tricks that can make your presentations stand out from the rest. 

Creating Your Presentation

We can’t help you avoid the anxiety of presenting to a group, but if your show is engaging, you’ll have a lot less to be nervous about.
Like any good Mac productivity software, Keynote lets you put together basic slides quickly, but it’s only through the process of trial and error that you’ll discover some of the more creative and useful aspects of how to control the way elements are brought on and off the screen. Good presentations are all about the art of storytelling, and getting all your ducks in a row during the creation process will help in keeping your audience focused on your message.

Throw A Theme Party

If you like the Pinstripe theme best, you can make it your default theme easily.

When you create a new Keynote presentation, you’re prompted to choose one of the existing templates, or “themes.” If there’s a theme that you use on a regular basis, you can have Keynote automatically use it when creating a new document by opening the Preferences window, and changing the default Show Theme Chooser option to Use Theme and selecting the theme you want as your default. 

Navigating Navigator

If you want to see a visual overview of your presentation, nothing beats the Light Table.

The default Navigator mode is what most people use on a daily basis when working in Keynote, but there are other ways to view your presentation’s structure. Click the Views button in the toolbar, and try out the Light Table option, which puts the slides in a rectangular “matrix” view. Slides are easily rearranged in the Light Table by dragging them to the desired position. You can also use the Shift and Command keys to select continuous or discontinuous ranges of slides for repositioning.

Master The Master Slide

The Title & Bullets slide format need not be the form for all new slides in a presentation—unless you want it to be.

Once you’ve created a new Keynote document, you’ll see the default “Title & Subtitle,” which is the slide that starts your presentation. Every time you add a new slide, a new master slide is created—usually the “Title & Bullets” slide. This is fine for business presentations, but let’s say you’d like to create a slideshow of still images, or something even more creative, and you want every new slide to be blank. Click the Master button in the toolbar, and select the Blank slide—this will result in a blank slide every time you click  +/New in the toolbar (or choose the New Slide command in the Slide menu).