Most of you new to the Mac are not familiar with iWork, which is Apple’s competitor to Microsoft Office. The trial is installed on every new Mac, after which you’ve got to fork out $80 for the full package. It incorporates Pages, which substitutes for Word and Publisher. Numbers, the spreadsheet tool much like Excel. And then there’s Keynote, the one which not only competes, but also kicks the ass of Powerpoint out of the pond. And it kicks it so hard, that Powerpoint will never be able to swim in that pond again.
Keynote is the most amazing presentation tool out there. Within minutes, you can create smooth presentations that will bring out that real ‘Wow’ (not the pathetic one Microsoft talked about with Vista). Already up at version 4, Keynote has matured, and has some great features like instant alphas, transitions and templates that are guaranteed to make people just stare at your presentations.
You should note that I failed my computer practicals in college (topic was Microsoft Office) mainly cause I couldn’t make a good enough Powerpoint presentation. But within 10 minutes I had figured out how to work Keynote and made a stunning presentation my dad, then used on one of his talks. It has been three years since and he swears by Keynote presentations. As you can see, so do I.
In this little mini series, I’m going to show you what keynote is about, how to use it, as well as let you download the each of the presentations that I will make. This will be a standard step by step tutorial so you can learn as you go. There might excessive use of superlatives like awesome and amazing, but that’s just the way it is. By the end of this series, you will be able to create the best presentation you have ever seen. So follow the steps, download the keynote files, and let’s try and make it fun!
Part 1. A quick introduction to the interface.
At launch, you are presented with the theme chooser. Choose any theme you like based on the thumbnail preview. Each theme is customisable to the very last, so go ahead and pick one. For this tutorial, I’m going to choose the simple (yet powerful) Gradient theme.
From hereon, Keynote can be divided into four key areas. The left side shows your slides as thumbnails. The right side shows the selected slide. The top bar is your toolbar, and hidden somewhere, is the inspector (View > Show Inspector). The floating palette is one of the most important tools of Keynote.
At its core, Keynote is a presentation app, and is based on the concept of showing one slide after another. The left sidebar shows you thumbnail previews of your slides as they would appear one after the other. The right side on the other hand shows your what the slide will look like. Very simple right?
The toolbar incorporates important buttons by default, just enough for your presentation. You can of course customise that toolbar using one of the most expansive button sheet I have ever seen.
The fourth important area of Keynote, is the Inspector. Appears to be a simple floating palette, similar to the one on Pages or Numbers, but it is really important in Keynote and you will be spending a whole lot of time on the Inspector. Now that we’ve got ourselves acquainted, let’s get our hands dirty.
Part 2. Creating a simple presentation.
In this guide, I’m going to lay down the groundwork for future presentations. For lack of a better topic, I’ll just make it about How Awesome Keynote can be. It was either that, or The Awesome life of Steve Balmer, so I think I chose wisely. At any point, to see what you are doing, hit the Play button in the toolbar and click the mouse to advance to the next slide.
Slide 1: All I did was double-click the titles and entered the text and look how great it looks already! I told you Keynote was a very simple application. This is just proof of that. Apple’s attention to good typography let’s you create amazing presentation with minimal work.
Slide 2: Click on the “New” button at the left of the toolbar to insert a new slide. It will insert the default style for that theme. However, for this one, let’s insert a prefab bullet list. To do that, click the Masters button in the toolbar and select “Title & Bullets” from the drop down list. Notice the different types of styles available. We’ll get to those later.
Slide 3: For the third slide I selected “Photo - Horizontal reflection” as the slide style. I then typed in my text. Since the font size was too big, I clicked out of the text box, and then single clicked on the text box. Then from the toolbar, I selected “View > Show Format bar”. 
This brings up the format bar introduced with iWork 08. Reduced the font size to fit all of the text in. I then quickly took a screenshot of the keynote window and dragged that screenshot file from my desktop to the image box provided. The image is automatically resized as is the reflection.
Slide 4: For the fourth slide, I’ve chosen the blank template. Then click the Smart Builds button in the toolbar. I’ve chosen the ‘Thumb through’ effect, but all of them work the same way. This puts a huge proxy for the image on my slide, as well as a grey floating palette with a “Drop image here” proxy thumbnail. Then, clicked the “Media” button in the toolbar to bring up my Media Library.
The Media Library, for those unfamiliar with it, shows you all the media on your computer from your iApps. This includes your music from iTunes, photos from iPhoto, or movies in your Movies folder. The tool stays the same across all of the iWork apps, and is also available in several other applications which access it.
From there I selected and dragged three images from my iPhoto library onto the Drop Images floating palette. It will arrange the thumbnails horizontally. I then opened up my Inspector, clicked on the “Graphic” icon in the top, and check marked the “Reflection” option at the bottom. This automatically adds a reflection to my images.
Slide 5: To end the presentation, I created another slide, with a plain “Title and subtitle” frame.
Simple enough wasn’t it? Next week we jazz up this same presentation adding effects, transitions and a whole bunch of other goodies. So bookmark us in your feed reader, or subscribe via email to stay up to date on Apple news. If you have any Keynote related questions, or feel like contributing some tips, feel free to leave those in the comments.
As promised, you can download the Keynote file and reverse engineer the slideshow if you have any problems.
