Learn to Love The Inspector

If you click on the thumbnail of the slide in the Inspector, you’ll see a preview of the current Transition effect.

The Inspector is really the most important tool in Keynote, with access to all the detailed settings of your overall document, individual slides, text, graphic elements, imported QuickTime movies, tables, charts, and just about anything else you’ll need for fine-tuning everything. Select an individual graphic, text block, or slide, and the Inspector will give you the lowdown on that item. 

Retool The Toolbar

Drag the tools you want right onto the document’s toolbar to customize your world.

You can customize the icons displayed in the Toolbar by choosing View > Customize Toolbar. This allows you quick access to the commands and tools you’re most likely to use in your presentation work. If you don’t create presentations, you can remove those icons from the toolbar by simply dragging them off the toolbar when the “customize toolbar” window is open.

To The Letter

Cool icons, bullets, and glyphs are a click away with the Characters palette.

Text attributes are edited in two places: The Text tab in the Inspector contains text-block formatting, spacing, bullets, and column controls, while the Fonts tool in the toolbar delivers detailed typographic control, including drop shadows, underlining, strikethrough, font style, and size. Click the options icon, and open the Characters palette for access to character tables, which is especially cool if you’ve got some interesting pictorial typefaces installed on your computer. Double-click any displayed character to insert it into the currently active text field on a slide.

Work on Your Image

Command-click multiple slides, then apply a transition to all of them at once.

If you’re creating a slideshow of photos or art, you’ll want a sequence of individual, full-screen images without much text. If you drag multiple images from an external source (Finder, iPhoto, Adobe Bridge, etc.) into the left-hand column of Keynote’s default Navigator view, each image will automatically create an individual slide. If those images came from a digital camera dump, it’s likely that they’ll be larger than the current slideshow dimensions (which can be changed in the Document pane of the Inspector window). While you can resize imported images inside of Keynote, there’s no way to do this to more than one image at a time. We suggest using a dedicated image editor to resize images to match the dimensions of your slideshow (which should be set to your final display dimensions). With multiple slides selected, choosing a transition effect from the Slide tab of the Inspector places that transition onto all the selected slides.