Welcome back to the Keynote mini-series. The last time round, I introduced Keynote and walked you through the process of creating a simple presentation, just to get the wheels turning. Let’s take it up a notch now, and start adding a few effects and styles to make that presentation *pop*.
But first, let me mention some choice quotes from MacDailyNews commenters, after the article was carried there.
“I doubt what they’ve done is as rich as PowerPoint.” - Bill Gates, Microsoft Chairman, January 8, 2003
And to that sparked this reply:
Richer than PowerPoint? Can you even use those words in the same sentence? A crayon and a Big Chief tablet are richer than PowerPoint…
Then there’s the hilarious comparison of Keynote with Powerpoint
When you try PowerPoint, it feels like you come from driving a Ferrari to drive a Yugo. And this is, even with the Mac version of Power Point. I tried the Windows version… man, it felt like driving a bike without a seat.
To which the reply
That *is* the Windows experience!
And neither the last, nor the least:
“Power corrupts. Powerpoint corrupts absolutely.”
Thanks for the amazing support, everyone, and the witty quips. Getting back to our topic at hand though, let’s resume from where we last left off. If you have loaded the previous Keynote file back into Keynote, you’ll see five slides there. [Ed note: In case you do not have the original file or have edited and saved it, you can grab a fresh copy from here.] Now, let’s add some transition effects to them.
Effects to slides
To add a transition effect between slides, select the first slide in the sidebar. Then, in your Inspector palette, select the “Slide” panel. Simply choose whatever “Effect” you want and you are already more than halfway there. You can change the duration of that transition to whatever amount you want and automatically set it to start the transition after a set amount of time. On-click means it will begin the transition at the click of your mouse.
Slides with effects will be labeled with a little triangle at the bottom of the slide thumbnail to make it easier for you to recognise them. Go ahead and add effects to all the slides. Command clicking each of the slide thumbnails allows you to apply a single effect to multiple slides.
The important thing is to choose wisely and be consistent. For instance, you can give your main topic introduction slides the “Doorway” effect, the content slides a “Flip” effect, and your final slide the “Confetti” effect. Also, know your target audience. Use subtle styles when dealing with people who are not familiar with technology but freak out on the effects when you are, say, at a tech conference.
Effects to objects
Notice in second slide we have a list of bullets. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could animate those in one by one? Keynote, like I’ve said before, makes it easy to create complex effects.
Select the entire bullet list box and, in your Inspector, select the “Build” panel. Unlike the Slide panel, the Build panel has three separate panes.
Build In lets you select how the object comes into the slide and Build Out allows you configure how it moves out. Action is an optional pane that allows you to fine tune your effect. It lets you add A-to-B transition effects, among other things.
With the entire bulleted box selected, I chose ‘Sparkle’ as the effect, ‘Left to Right’ as the direction, and ‘By Bullet’ as the mode of delivery. This will change to ‘By Paragraph’ or something else when the object type changes. Keynote will then add a orange box at the corner of the object to indicate that an effect has been added.
I’ve also added an effect for the title as soon as the slide appears. And then added a build out animation for the title and bullets with a deliver setting of ‘All At Once’.
A-to-B animations
New in Keynote ’08 are A-to-B animations. Previously, PowerPoint had an edge over Keynote in this particular area (yeah, I know—shocking, right?) and many ardent Winboys (short for ‘Windows fanboys’) would interject that Keynote can’t even do A-to-B animations. Well, thankfully, if only to satisfy the “critics”, Keynote now has full featured A-to-B animations and makes it very simple to add them to your presentation.
A-to-B animation is basically making an object move from one place to another. Of course, one can change the course of the path, increase or decrease the size of the object, or even fade it in or out. Let’s dig in then.
Clicking on the Effect drop down in the Actions tab, you will find four main actions and a bunch of other actions that have been pulled out of the smart builds we talked about (Part 1: Step 4). The “Move” effect is your point-to-point A-to-B animation. Selecting Move will auto generate two points and the preview box will show a slight move in the object. The slide canvas, on the other hand, will show the object along with a ghosted image of the same. The opaque object is where it starts off and the ghosted image is where it ends.
To change the starting and ending positions, merely drag the objects to wherever you wish. If you click out of the object though, you will lose the ghosted image. You can get it back by clicking the red proxy button at the bottom right of the opaque object. If you play the slide now, the animation will play as you’d expect it to. But that’s not enough.
Putting actions to work
In this slide, I want a title, four bullets, and a bunch of objects in between, animated with the help of actions. I want each bullet to appear, followed by the animation, then the next bullet, and so on. Wash, rinse, repeat. I’ve selected the “Title + Bullets - Left” master style and entered in four bullet points. I then used the Inspector’s “Build In” tab to set the effect to “Dissolve”, the delivery mode to “By Bullet”, and unlike the last time, I checked “Separate timings for elements”. This will allow me to animate objects in between the bullet animations.
I have now dragged and dropped in the Keynote logo and, in the Actions tab, I select “Move” as the effect, and click on the the curved line button. The animation now moves up and then down along the curved path. Let’s edit that to suit our liking.
The curved line behaves very much like the paths in Photoshop or any other image editing application. Here, you hold down the Option key and click on the curved line to create an extra point. The animation will move from one point to the next, till it reaches the end (symbolised, again, by the ghosted object). I aligned the ghosted image in the place where I want it to be, to the right of the bullets, and then moved the starting point off the top of the page. I also changed the Acceleration to “Ease Out”. Easing is to make the object slow down or pick up speed gradually. Easing out will make the object slow down towards the end. Easing in will make it pick up speed till it is maximum at the end.
Next, I wanted a dart to hit the logo. So I aligned the dart in such a manner that it comes straight up and hits the logo. I decreased the timing of this to ten seconds and changed the acceleration to “Ease In”.
Next, I brought in a ‘WOW’ graphic that I want to appear spinning on top of the logo. I first added the “Appear” effect as the Build In setting and then added the “Rotate” effect to 1400 degrees. The timing was also changed to fifty seconds. I needed to add the appear effect because otherwise the graphic would’ve just sat itself there as soon as the slide loaded, giving the game away.
As a finishing touch, I wanted to increase the size of the logo along with the dart and the ‘WOW’ graphic. So I selected the logo icon and hit “Add Action” button in the Inspector. I added the “Scale” effect with 114% as the value and replicated the same action for the dart and the ‘WOW’ graphic. Now, all that’s left is the arranging.
Clicking the “Show Drawer” button in the Inspector brings up the Build Order panel. Here you can arrange builds as you see fit using plain ol’ drag-and-drop. Notice how I’ve split the bullet points across the different objects.
At the bottom of the panel is the “Start Build” option. The options are pretty much self explanatory. I’ve selected “Automatically with previous build” for most of the graphic objects and selected “OnClick” for the text bullets. This means that whenever I click anywhere on the screen, the text bullet and graphic both start building in the same time, and then wait for the next click once they’re done showing off.
In conclusion
The Actions feature is still in its early stages. For one, you cannot execute two actions at the same time. It would be cool to have an object scale as well as move at the same time. The next version of iWork should fill in some of those gaps.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the second installment in this mini series. I hope you’ll be back next week and we’ll discuss type, tables, and charts, and how it all fits into the overall scheme of your Keynote presentation. Do leave your comments, suggestions, and additional tips. As usual, you can download the keynote file to check out the effects and, in particular, the build orders.
