When it came on the scene two years ago, Keynote ( , April 2003 ) was really the first viable presentation tool alternative to Microsoft’s PowerPoint on the Mac. While Apple’s offering surpassed PowerPoint in some areas (transitions, graphics handling, professionalism of templates), it fell far short in others (detailed info on slides during presentations, automatic animation options, slide timing). Keynote 2— unveiled at Macworld Expo and now shipping as part of the iWork ’05 suite—aims to narrow the gap, while adding even more compelling features.
Here’s a first look at some of the major changes in the latest version of Keynote.
Themes
Animations, Transitions, and External Media
Animation of both objects and text has improved greatly. In the first release, there were just nine options for types of “builds,” which is a shortcut term for animating the text and graphics on your slides. In the second release, there are now 26 different techniques, including choices such as iris, twirl, pop, and cube. In addition, some of these build types work on individual words or characters within a line, as seen in this movie, which shows the “character compression” build working on a character-by-character basis. In the previous version of Keynote, build effects could only be applied to entire lines.
Transitions are visual effects applied when switching from slide to slide. The original version was best known for its rotating 3-D cube transition, whereby one slide seemingly rotated around a cube to the next. The new version adds a very elegant page flip 3-D transition, and seven additional 2-D transitions, including the cool pond ripple effect seen in this movie clip.
Text, Web Pages, and Other Objects
Text handling has also gotten some attention in this update. New features allow you to set extra space before and after paragraphs, and bullets and numbering now have their own tab for easier distinction from text-handling features.
You can also embed Web pages directly into presentations. Instead of shooting a picture of a Web page and pasting the image, just insert a Web View, and you’ll have the actual page—and an Update Automatically option will make sure it’s always the latest view, assuming you have a network connection.
There are also six new shapes you can add to slides, including two different arrow styles, a diamond, floating “cartoon-style” quote bubble, and an octagon. This gives you 12 shapes to work with, and with full control over fill color or image, transparency, and line type, you can get quite creative.
You can also easily add text directly to an object; the previous version required adding a new text layer and positioning it on top of the existing object. Now a simple double-click on an object puts the text insertion point in the center of that object, and you just start typing.
Finally, although table handling was already one of Keynote’s strengths, it’s also been improved in this release. The new table tool offers easy creation of row and column headers, precise column and row sizing in pixels, a button to resize cells automatically as content changes, and a set of buttons to quickly select entire rows and columns.
Smoothing the Show
Beyond Basic Presentations
The new version of Keynote has a few neat features that make it suitable for more than just standard “person talking to crowd” usage. First off, you can set any slideshow to automatically enter Play mode when it’s opened, and you can put it in loop mode, so it just repeats over and over. If you also set the presentation mode to Self-Playing, then the entire presentation will run without any user intervention—all builds and transitions occur without any intervention, with the timings that you set for them. But if you had them set to happen on a mouse click, then you’ll also have to set the two new top-level settings for Build and Transition delays; these timings will then take the place of the mouse click. When combined with Keynote’s amazing 3-D transitions and great handling of images and movies, you can create a self-playing photography portfolio, a display of your sketchwork, or collection of classic movie clips—all of which will just be shown to passersby without any intervention on their part.
Sharing With Others
Presentations often need to be shared—attendees want a copy of your slides, you’d like to make your presentation available via the Web, or someone on a PC needs to edit your work. Keynote has always offered the ability to export to QuickTime, PDF, and PowerPoint, but the new release adds two more—Flash, for easy web display, and Images, which saves each slide as a separate image file (PNG, TIFF, or JPEG). In addition, a few annoying bugs from the original’s export tools have been fixed. PDF export now fully supports transparency, and embedded QuickTime movies no longer cause odd problems when exporting to QuickTime.
Wrap Up
Keynote was a strong presentation creation application in its 1.0 release. With the new version, it’s become an even stronger competitor to PowerPoint. From its seamless integration with iPhoto and iTunes to its greatly improved animation and slide timing features, the new version of Keynote looks like a winner.
Sidebar: Save the Leather and Sandstone
As noted in the Keynote 2 preview, the new version adds ten themes, but kills two (Sandstone and Leather Book) in the process. If you have the first version of Keynote, you can easily resurrect these themes from the dead.
In the Finder, control-click on the first version of Keynote and select Show Package Contents. In the new window that opens, navigate to Contents: Resources: Themes. Open a new Finder window, and navigate to the top-level Library: Application Support: Keynote: Themes. If you don’t see the Themes folder, just create a new folder in the Keynote folder, name it Themes, then open it. Make sure both the new and old Finder windows are visible. Hold down the command key, and in the first window you opened, click on the four themes we’re going to “save:”
Release the command key, click and hold on any of the four highlighted items, press and hold the option key (which will force a copy of these files), and then drag and drop them into the new folder you created. If you’re doing it right, your screen should look something like this just before you drop the copies:
That’s it! The next time you launch the new Keynote, you’ll have 22 themes to choose from, with the two salvaged themes appearing at the end of the list.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details.