Keynote, Apple’s version of PowerPoint, contains several tools to help spice up (or slim down) your presentation. Apple offers several time-saving tips in their short tutorials that are definitely worth taking a look at.
Here are a few things I’ve recently learned:
When working in Keynote, click on a slide thumbnail in the left column and press the Tab key. This will indent the slide beneath the slide above it, similar to an outline. (Press Shift > Tab to un-do it.) This is helpful when working with several slides and want to collapse or group them by section.
At the top of Keynote, click View > Light Table to see all of your slides at once. You can also move slides around in this view by clicking and dragging. Click View > Navigator to return to the original screen.
Once you have entered information into a graph, you can change the style of graph without losing information. When using a 3D pie chart, you can also drag one of the “pieces” out to draw attention to that particular section.
Use the Alpha tool to remove color from the background of photos. This allows an image to have a transparent background without the use of a separate program, such as Photoshop.
Use the Mask tool to crop a picture without really editing it. Click Format > Mask to access this tool.
A few months ago I received a new MacBook Pro for work and spent a few weeks slowly migrating everything over from my older Macbook laptop. I used this opportunity to perform some hearty spring cleaning and printed a list of every piece of software currently installed on my old laptop. I crossed off outdated versions and any programs that hadn’t been used in over six months. This eliminated over half the applications thus saving time and capacity when setting up my new laptop. I decided that in order to survive the great Laptop Migration of 2010 each program had to be efficient, completely necessary, or host to a unique set of tools. For my personal and professional needs, Microsoft Office didn’t make the cut.
My intentions are not to negate its usefulness to others, I’ve just found that iWork does everything I need it to do. I had copies of both iWork and Microsoft Office on my old laptop. This took up more space, but I thought I needed Microsoft Office because thats what I had always used. When I decided to give Pages (equivalent to Word) and Keynote (similar to PowerPoint) a try I found the interface to be friendlier, the process to be faster, and the headaches to be fewer. Both programs allow documents to be exported as .pdf or .doc, making compatibility with others fairly seamless. My daily routine consists of two separate professions, schoolwork, and personal tasks all demanding accessibility to Microsoft Office. I haven’t missed it yet.
photo credit
This is great news for those of us using Keynote (instead of PowerPoint) and publishing slides to SlideShare. You no longer have to convert to PPT or PDF to upload your slides! You do have to create a ZIP file of them, which is just a matter of right-clicking (or control-clicking) your Keynote slides file and selecting “Compress (name of file).” Then upload the new file that’s created (it’ll end in “.zip”) to SlideShare.
Read more about this new development on SlideShare’s blog. (Thanks Daring Fireball.)
