- What Is iWork, Anyway?
- A Flair for Presentation: Keynote 2
- Using Pages Instead of Word?
- The Bottom Line
- Tip Sheet
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A Flair for Presentation: Keynote 2
I spend a lot of time presenting—in classrooms, at conferences, and in corporate offices. A mainstay of my life has been Microsoft PowerPoint. It's not that I particularly like it; it is just simple to use. Presentations can be knocked out in minutes rather than hours (if I were using a product such as Macromedia Flash). I'm not a great believer in adding charts, pictures, and other cool media elements to my presentations. The focus of a presentation is the presenter, not PowerPoint.
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So, rather dubiously, I looked at Keynote 2. What I saw when I opened Keynote is that it's stripped of many of the features found in competing products. It's a straightforward tool that allows you to get started with your presentation immediately.
Tools include features such as the Slide Organizer (found along the left side of the screen). Quickly and easily you can move, group, and arrange your slides. Other tools, such as the new presenter tools, give you control over your slides. The new presenter tools give the presenter a view of the presentation, showing the current and next slide. This is not broadcast to the screen. All the animation tools in Keynote are cool, but the presenter tools are the most important reason why I like this product. It seems like such as simple idea, but it's one that Microsoft and Corel appear to have missed.
Apple has gone to town with its presentation theme designs. You will not find the quirky, odd, and just plain weird theme styles of PowerPoint in Keynote. Each slide looks beautiful, and the beauty does not stop with themes. There are also stunning slide transitions and text animations. Unlike other programs, Keynote's visual effects are made effective at supporting the presenter simply because they are professional and elegant. You do not have spinning pixilated text effects.
If you are the controller of your own beauty, you will find that Keynote does time in elegantly with iLife. Photos, music, and movies can be pulled from iPhoto, iTunes, and iMovie into Keynote and used on any slide. Additional touch-up tools in Keynote will add extra polish to any image imported. In addition to importing from iLife, you can also import the following formats:
- JPEG, PNG, and TIFF
- Macromedia Flash
- Adobe Acrobat (PDF)
- Microsoft PowerPoint
- QuickTime
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe Photoshop
- AppleWorks
- Microsoft Excel
- XML
I still like to use PowerPoint, and I still have to use a Windows PC when I am at some clients' locations. A key feature that must be available to me is compatibility. This is not a Mac-only world, and Apple recognizes this. Instead of trying to build a compatibility war, Apple has taken an open-door approach to Keynote. You can export files out of Keynote in the following formats:
- JPEG, PNG, and TIFF
- Macromedia Flash
- Adobe Acrobat (PDF)
- Microsoft PowerPoint
- QuickTime
The export works well. Visual animations and transitions do not export, but the themes and screen layout do. One export feature that is missing, however, is a, HTML/web export. A web page export has been standard for PowerPoint since 1997, and it would be good to see it in Keynote.
Overall, what I like about Keynote is its simplicity. I am not a "power user" of PowerPoint; I only want my presentation to look clean and support what I am saying. With that said, the beautiful transitions are almost impossible to use. Not because they are gaudy and bold but because they are subtle and sophisticated. Unfortunately, unless Apple comes out with a Windows version of Keynote, I will need to keep using PowerPoint (although I will certainly choose Keynote when I can).