Kissell - Take Control of Keynote

Among people who create presentations frequently, Microsofts PowerPoint has long been so dominant that the name has become a generic termI often hear people say things like she showed a PowerPoint rather than she showed a presentation or she showed a slide deck. But with all due respect to PowerPoint, which is in fact a fine app, Keynote is what the cool kids use these days.

Keynote, like PowerPoint, is a tool for creating sequences of visual elements, typically used as supporting material for live presentations such as speeches, training programs, comedy routines, and sermons. But because the format is so flexible, its often used for other things tooeverything from self-playing presentations that run on museum kiosks to mockups of apps and Web pages (somewhat in the style of HyperCard, for those who remember it).

Presentations can include extremely fancy animations and visual effects, spreadsheet-like tables, interactive charts, audio and video elements, and much more. Sadly, though, most of the Keynote (and PowerPoint) presentations I see are boringslide after slide of dense, static, bulleted lists, read nearly verbatim by the presenter. Conversely, Ive seen far too many presentations that overdo special effects to the point that they distract the audience from the content (as though visual pizazz can substitute for a well-constructed performance).

In this book, Id like to help you solve both of those problems by showing you how to use Keynote as effectively as possible. Part of what Ill discuss is figuring out what you want to say, how best to support your ideas visually, and how to use Keynotes live presentation features (where applicable) to their best advantage. The other part, however, is explaining the mechanics of Keynotehow to go about constructing, arranging, and beautifying your presentations, making use of a surprisingly large and diverse set of capabilities.

This is not intended as a comprehensive reference. I ignore some features completely, and I mention others only in passing. For example, you dont need me to spell out how to make text bold, how to save a file, or how to copy and paste, because Keynote does these things the same way as most other Mac apps.

In addition, for some details Ill refer you elsewherefor example, the formulas and calculations available in Keynotes tables would require many pages to document completely, but theyre nearly the same as what Numbers offers, and Take Control has a terrific book on Numbers already (Sharon Zardettos Take Control of Numbers).

But if youre curious about a feature that Ive omitted, dont forget that Keynote has pretty good built-in helpchoose Help > Keynote Help to view it. Although its a bit dry and not nearly as detailed as this book in most respects, its not half bad.

This book covers Keynote 6 (the latest update, as of publication date, is 6.5.3), which requires OS X 10.9 Mavericks or later. Although the iOS and Web versions of Keynote are accessible from other operating systems, I dont describe them in detail, but I do give an overview of how they compare to the Mac version in .