Keynote 2

[mindbend]

After prepping an important presentation for a client in PowerPoint, I came to the realization that it just wasn't as good as I was hoping it would be. PowerPoint is just too limiting and too low quality in everything it does.

So I went out on a limb and proposed having the client let me redo it in Keynote and they could just use my iBook to present it. Once I showed them a couple of transitions in Keynote, their decision was easy. They let me do it.


The Good:
Keynote's transitions and animations are glass. So smooth and silky, they destroy PowerPoint at its best.

Imports Photoshop and Illustrator files complete with transparency and vector info. Wow! I was able to do some gorgeous layouts thanks to this.

I really like how Keynote is organized for editing. The sidebar panel of thumbs is great. Same for the inspector pallette. You can get to where you want far easier than PPT.

You can animate multiple elements at the same time without grouping them. Nice!

Very easy method of using Master pages.

The selection of objects is how is should be, unlike PPT. If you marquee select some objects, you only have to marquee a portion of the object to select it. In PPT, you have to select the whole dang thing. Very annoying. Also, in Keynote slecting an individual object is a lot easier than PPT, which does this annoying thing on text boxes where you have to select it twice in effect.

True transparency. Nuff said.

You can select multiple objects and change all of their heights, for example, in the inspector. So if you have a bunch of shapes that you want to be 35 pixels tall, no prob. You can force it to maintain propotions, too. Nice.

Smart guides, so you can quickly tell when objects are aligned. Love it.

The Bad:
You can't resize a group of objects. This is very bad! If you need to resize a group, you have to break it apart and resize the pieces individually. Argh!

End file sizes can be larger than PowerPoint equivalents. (But who cares, they're so much better!)

You can't change fonts with the Text inspector, which seems odd. You have to bring up the separate Show Fonts menu. Kind of kills the point of the text inspector, which would be a lot easier.

Summary:

Keynote may not be able to do quite as much as PPT, but it does what it does so much better, that 90% of the time you won't care.

I'd like to see them add slightly more ambitious animation options (like following a path for example).

Also, Apple should really consider making some kind of Keynote player for Windows (and I don't mean just using Quicktime).

In short, Keynote is WAY better than PowerPoint for making nice looking presentations. In and of itself, Keynote is very good with room for improvement. I was able to work about five times faster in Keynote than PPT once I got the hang of it.

[powermac]

Great review of Keynote. I agree with every point. I use it exclusively for presentations, and find it a great tool. Of course, keeping with Apple's traditional view of sensational, I use the transitions. Many people, after my presentations ask, "how did you get power point to do that." I laugh and say, "don't use power point."

[andyhargreaves]

Hi Guys

Just started using Keynote, and am similarly impressed. The only thing I can think of to comment on is that one of the transitions I expected to be there is missing. The one I mean is the one which is like a liquid trickling away through the page, as used in the Apple preview movie of the iWork suite (no, not the "droplet" transition). I'm not sure why I was expecting to be able to do this (perhaps it was that movie?) but I was a bit disappointed. Never mind - it's great all the same.

Andy

[baldprof]

I have used Keynote occaisionally for two months now. I agree with the reviewers comments. I generally like it.

The presentations can be converted to Powerpoint when they have to be run on a Windows machine or a Mac which has Office installed. This can work smoothly if you are careful about your font choices.There will of course be some changes to the animation effects and the transitions, so be sure to view the exported file in PowerPoint before you present.
But most important: Some really weird stuff can happen if the machine on which you run the presentation does not have the same fonts as the machine on which you created the presentation, especially if the presenting machine runs Windows.
My recommendation:if you know the presentation will be shown on a Windows PC, use only the most widely available fonts, i.e. the ones which come with Office. You may find this limiting, but you'll save yourself a lot of grief.

[andyhargreaves]

True enough. I have found (in my limited experience) that the best way to show presentations in Windows is by exporting them to Quicktime. Ignoring the huge file sizes, this works really well and ensures your presentations look as stunning as you intended.

Now, all this becomes immaterial when I get round to robbing a bank and buying a PowerBook!

Andy

[aquamacus]

So does anyone know of a good way to show these presentations full-screen if exported to Quicktime? I know you can do it if you have Quicktime Pro, but anyone know of another way?

[mindbend]

Do a search at versiontracker.com for "movie player". There should be a bunch of options, many of which play quicktime movies at full screen.

[TangentIdea]

I've been using Keynote for the past couple of weeks, and I've fallen in love with it. It's certainly more simplified than PowerPoint, but I consider this a strength, not a weakness. PowerPoint's design layout is more open-ended, allowing you more design and animation options, but this discourages good consistent design. Furthermore, it's more difficult to use, and it takes longer to create even a simple outline presentation. Keynote makes it easy.

Keynote's file conversion from PowerPoint is pretty good, but not flawless. However, I haven't noticed any significant bugs other than a little bit of unpredictable rendering of text and text builds. Even when the exact same font is installed on the Mac as the PC running PPT, text blocks won't always wrap at exactly the same places, leaving words "dangling," running off the screen, or just not appearing where they were supposed to. In one case, the PC displayed a font as oblique by default, and the Mac displayed it as regular, by default. Sometimes text builds do not perform as expected, as well. All of those problems can be somewhat easily fixed with some manual tweaking, however.