Keynote: Presentation Program from Apple $99 from the Apple Store Reviewed by Francine Schwieder

First off I'll admit that even though I do presentations I had never used a presentation program before. I have a copy of MS PowerPoint, but the only thing I used it for was to open PowerPoint files sent to me, or to someone else who didn't have it, and extract any content that was of interest. Indeed, that's all I use Word for, too. And I never use Excel or Entourage either. MS is just so, well, you know. So when Keynote was introduced I was interested in trying it out, but not interested enough to spend $99 for it. When SMUG got a review copy I leaped at the chance to give it a whirl, but in mid-leap got involved in other things, so didn't actually get around to installing and trying it for over a month. I've now given it a whirl and am here to report that it is very nifty and easy to use.

I installed it and decided that since it's an Apple program it just had to run using conventions I was familiar with, so I ought to be able to use it without reading any instructions. Everything should work the way all my other Apple programs work and the interface should be perfectly intuitive. I then proceeded directly to trying to make a presentation. When launched you are immediately confronted with a window having thumbnails of the various "themes" available and it's obvious you aren't going any further until you choose one, so I did.

I got a window with a well designed background for my first slide, and two boxes with pretty type, one with big type and one with little type. Both read "Double-click to edit." I double-clicked and typed in my title and subtitle. If I only click once the text box is selected, so you ought to be able to Do Things with it. You can. You can move or resize the box, although to resize the type you have to click the Fonts button and select a different size (you can also change the font). OK, now how about a page with pictures? The simple toolbar across the top is like all the OSX window toolbars, and there was a button with a plus and the word "new" underneath. That ought to get me a new slide. It did. This one has the title text and another box with a neat bullet and text to edit. I typed a title, then typed a legend next to the bullet and hit Return, and another bullet appeared. Cool. But what about adding a picture? Hmm. There wasn't anything obvious: the File menu has an entry for an Image library, but that just has Apple pictures in it (though I figured I could add my own eventually), and the only other menu that seemed promising was an item called "Place..." in the Edit menu. From using other Mac programs I knew that Place was one way to add text or graphics, but there was nothing there about adding one's own graphic, just an item at the bottom for "Choose..." which brought up the file navigation dialog box. That seemed like too much trouble, and since I had the picture I wanted open in another program I simply copied it there, went back to Keynote and pasted. It appeared in the page, was selected, and as I drug it around I noticed that when it was centered little yellow lines appeared. Nice and easy alignment. In short order I had made a 9 page presentation that looked pretty good.

I saved it as a Keynote file as I worked, but you can only play that if you have Keynote on your computer. What if you want to burn your presentation to a CD to share with someone else, even someone who uses Windows? So I took a look at the "Export..." options in the File menu. I discovered you can save as a QuickTime Movie, as a PowerPoint document or as a PDF file. If you select QuickTime you can either make it interactive (each slide waits for you to click before moving on to the next one), or a self-contained movie that just runs. I decided to make a movie, which it did. The movie opened in QuickTime and played. It was big and beautiful and only 1MB in size. Pretty easy! Saving as PowerPoint generates an appropriate file which, when double-clicked, launches PowerPoint and that program opens the file. The PDF file opens in whatever your default PDF reader is. It turned out to be a rather large file, however. The Keynote upgrade promised to generate smaller PDF files, and it appeared in Software Update this morning. I ran the updater, and tried redoing a Keynote file, which went from 2MBs to about 340KBs. So if you buy Keynote 1.0 be sure to get the Update right away.

Next time I launched the program I decided to get more adventurous and try more things. I clicked the Inspector, checked out its functions, most of which were pretty easy to figure out, although I was mystified by what "Build" might be. I checked out the Master Slides, tried changing them, made a chart, fiddled with formatting and putting pictures into the prebuilt frames (you can not only move the pictures around but resize them to fit by simply dragging one of the selection handles). Then, being me, I decided I wanted to make my own themes, so broke into the program itself and took a look at the goodies inside, tried changing some of the graphics with Photoshop, and so on. Decided I needed to know a little bit more, so ran the Keynote presentation movie from Apple, cruised through the PDF User's Manual and the Keynote Apple discussion board while listening, and occasionally glancing at the movie, and discovered the right way to make my own themes, complete with the picture framing function. I also discovered what the "Build" thing does--pretty nifty animation--and how to use it. Decided to stop doing things TO the program, and instead do something WITH the program. Next time I launched Keynote I used my new-found knowledge to redo my presentation, and made it spiffier. I ended up with a really good QuickTime movie, complete with great special effects. Of course, it was now 10MBs, rather than one. Those special effects do bulk things up, but they look great and oh so professional.

I wanted it to have a sound track, but it seems that's one thing you can't do in Keynote, which I think is a decided short-coming. However you can do it if you have QuickTime Pro (which is only $30), so I opened my Keynote Quicktime movie and added happy march music written by my friend Mark Walsh. Now that I had it down pat (more or less), I decided to make a presentation from some of my flower pictures, complete with special effects, music (again by Mark Walsh), and even try to make it into a streaming video for the web. Worked great, got a small movie that is a mere 1.6MBs in size that runs about 2 minutes. Even managed to make a page to show it that will tell you to get the QuickTime plug-in if you don't have it. Take a look at Francine's Flowers, it should stream. You do need the latest version of QuickTime for it work properly.

I'm impressed with the visual quality of the presentations, and the ease with which I was able to create them. I feel pretty expert with Keynote and I've only launched it a grand total of four times, and the fourth was just to check stuff as I wrote this article. It doesn't get any easier than that.

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