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). 

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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.

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Transition Time
While the most basic presentations often don’t demand more than transitions between individual slides and bullet points, take the time to dive into the Builds Inspector pane, which lets you determine exactly when and how to bring individual text and graphics elements onto a slide. Click a specific text or graphic element on the slide, and set its Build transitions from the pop-ups. Build In brings elements onto the screen, and Build Out takes them away. There’s an ordering system expressed in numbers, 1 being the first thing that appears. The tough part is realizing that things can come and go in nonlinear order. For example, on the Build In side, a screen title might be 1, while 2 is assigned to a graphic element (in this case, a scary face) that comes up, and 3 is a text description of the graphic that appears after the image.

Now let’s say that you want the text (#3) to vanish with the next click, after which the face bursts into flames and vanishes: Click the Build Out pane, select the text, an effect, and select 4 from the Order popup. Click the face, select the Flame effect, and specify 5 for the order. As you can see from the screenshots shown here, you have total control over how individual elements appear on and disappear from the screen.

The slide title is assigned to #1 in the Build In panel, with a transition effect that moves it into the slide from above.

The face is assigned to #2, so it comes in after the title, with a Dissolve effect.

Last but not least is the text description, which is Build In item #3, and is set to simply “Appear” on the screen.

With the text selected, switch to the Build Out pane and choose any effect and #4 for ordering.

Select the face, the Flame effect, and #5 order for the face to burn up and vanish.

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Who Was That Masked Man?

Sadly, this masking trick does not work with imported QuickTime movies.

The Shapes tool has 15 presets, including a Pen tool for creating custom Bézier shapes. Plus, the shapes can be used to mask graphics. Create a new shape on a slide, and drag any supported graphic file into the selected shape, and drop the image. It’s automatically masked inside of the object, and clicking the image brings up a control panel for scaling the image inside of the shape mask. Double-clicking the image toggles a view that displays a ghosted version of the image beyond the shape boundaries, and you can reposition the masked image using the Hand tool. 

Son of Masks

Using a gradient as a mask allows you to have total control over blending with the background.

If you drop bitmapped images into Keynote, you can use the Alpha tool to make a quick mask without switching to an external image-editing app. As expected, objects on solid backgrounds make for the cleanest results. But for potentially problematic images, such as hair or smoke, you can click inside of multiple discontinuous regions, like the background around the phone and the area of the coiled phone cord in the screenshots.

Mergers & Acquisitions
Surprisingly, there’s no way to instantly import an existing Keynote presentation directly into another Keynote document. If you’re working in a group where multiple team members are working on separate, discrete portions of a presentation, you’ll need to open the multiple documents on a single machine, and drag all the slides from one Keynote document into another, dropping them in the Left column of the Navigator view, or into the desired position in the Light Table view.

Presentation Playback
A big part of the impression you make with a presentation is influenced by how it’s played to the audience. You may not need to use any other playback mode beyond the default Normal, but Keynote offers a few other options. Here are some tips for wowing your audience.

Put it On Auto-Pilot

The “self-playing” option makes your presentation run without you getting in the way.

In the Document subsection of the Document tab of the Inspector, click the pop-up menu for Presentation, and you’ll see a few choices for playback. “Self-playing” is designed for creating slideshows that simply run on their own, perfect for sequencing slideshows for information kiosks, self-contained art shows, or dynamic backdrops for big-screen TVs or projectors at parties or clubs. There are some special techniques to using this mode creatively, as detailed in the three tips that follow.

Know Your Processing Power
Certain transition effects require powerful graphics processors in more recent machines. The Confetti, Blur, and Flash transitions that look great on a MacBook Pro wouldn’t run at all on our PowerBook G4. Keynote automatically disables the transitions that don’t run on the machine a slideshow is running on, so you might need to tweak transition settings on the playback Mac.

Slow Dissolves
We normally recommend using quick transitions between slides and for Builds. But if you’re working with images exclusively, try longer transitions—we love setting Dissolves to last a couple of minutes between full-screen photos. And assigning a text or graphic element the Confetti build-out effect, set to evolve over 20 or 30 seconds, can be captivating

In for The Duration

Each slide in this self-running presentation is onscreen for 3.5 seconds.

The duration of all slides is automatically set by changing the delay for transitions in the Inspector’s Document panel. If you want a slide to last longer (or shorter) than this global value, you need to select the slide and click the Slide Transition panel, select “automatically” from the “Start Transition” popup menu, and enter the desired duration in the Delay field to the right. 

This slide is set to 11.5 seconds, which overrides the global 3.5 second slide duration set in the overall Document panel.

If a QuickTime movie is longer than the duration of its slide (which is set in the Inspector panel for the slide in question), it’ll get cut off by the next slide. You’ll need to increase the time in the duration field for the slide; a slide can be onscreen for 600 seconds (10 minutes) maximum. If your QuickTime movie is longer than that, you’re out of luck. However, the duration factor also depends on the playback computer. If you design a Keynote presentation with lots of movies and tweak the duration so it’s just right, you’ll get a shock when you go to play the presentation on a different, slower computer. To avoid making this discovery in front of your audience, always run your Keynote presentation on the Mac you plan to use for the final presentation.

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Four to The Floor
While you’re running a live show, the cursor keys move you backward and forward a slide at a time. Press the left or up arrows, and you’ll go back a slide (or build) without transition effects. The down and right arrows move you forward, with transitions. And no, there’s no way to move forward without transitions.

Getting to Carnegie Hall 

Practice makes perfect with the Rehearse Slideshow mode.

If you want to be your best when delivering a Keynote talk, get some friends together and make them sit through at least a couple of rehearsal runs. Take note of your pacing and flow by using the Rehearse Slideshow command (View menu), which helps you map out your presentation and get comfortable with the flow. Set a maximum time limit for your slideshow, and make sure you can cover all your points and slides in the allotted time.

Paper is A Medium Too

Select the Keynote option from the central options pop-up in the Print dialog.

There are lots of choices for formatting printed Keynote presentations.

Do as Steve Does

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and if you’re looking for some inspiration in putting together a compelling presentation, take a close look at any of Steve Jobs’s keynote speeches—where did you think they got the name of the software from? You’ll quickly realize that his design sense is all about minimalism—he prefers the most basic gray/black gradient, and often eschews fancy transitions for instant appearances of new slides or individual text or graphics elements on slides. He also doesn’t subscribe to the standard bullet-point mentality, but instead, treats the screen like a true multimedia stage, mixing up images and type as best serves the flow and focus of the presentation. In the art of presentation design, less is more, so while you’ll be tempted to use every wacky, wild effect in the toolbox, remember that restraint is a good thing when trying to present a clear, intelligible sequence of ideas or thoughts. To view recent keynote addresses, see www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv.

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Now Showing:  The Gear You Need To Make An Impact
Keynote ’08 is the only presentation app you need to create amazing slideshows and multimedia presentations. But there are some software and hardware add-ons that can go the extra mile so you can give your audience a show they won’t soon forget.—Mac|Life staff

Keynote Theme Park

More than just a collection of supercool Keynote themes, Keynote Theme Park collections greatly expand what you can do visually.

Keynote Theme Park($19.95 per theme, www.keynotethemepark.com) is a collection of standard (4:3 aspect ratio) and widescreen (16:9 aspect ratio) themes and effects for Keynote, including Spotlight, which features the eponymous spotlight effect and a variety of transitions. Plus, each theme comes with a .key presentation file that includes tips, instructions, and supplemental graphic elements that can round out the theme—and your presentations. 

Epson Powerlite 1705C Multimedia Projector

Buit-in Wi-Fi eliminates the need for a spaghetti plate of cables.

($1,149, www.epson.com) weighs just under 4 pounds and has 802.11a/b/n wireless connectivity built-in, so you can forgo the part of your presentation where you struggle with a snarl of cables before getting started.

Kensington's Wireless Presenter with Laser Pointer 

Give your slideshow from anywhere in the room—no need to be in arm’s reach of your Mac.

($59.95, www.kensington.com) gives you an instant way to control your Keynote slideshows from wherever you are in the room—the device uses the 2.4GHz wireless frequency and works from up to 60 feet away. The buttons let you accomplish key tasks.

JBL Duet 200 Stereo Loudspeaker

If music or sound effects are an important part of your Keynote presentations, bring the ($119.95, www.jbl.com) as your date to your next show. You’ll get big, full sound from this compact speaker, and at 1.5 pounds, it won’t add much in extra weight to your bag o’ gear.