10 Mac Keynote Tips

Learn some powerful techniques to help you master Keynote. You can easily add animation to your presentations, as well as live video, dynamic backgrounds, animated charts and more.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some techniques to help you master  Keynote. 
While Pages, Numbers, and Keynote share a lot of features you have unique things about each one. For instance in Keynote you have the unique ability of Text Fields to autosize the text inside. For instance here's a textfield here and the text fits nicely inside it. What happens if I add more text? Will it simply wrap? Well, it doesn't. It actually resizes the text to fit here on one line. This is due to a property here under Format, Text, and then go to Layout. You'll see Autosize Text. Turn that off and it will stick to the actual text font size and wrap to another line. You'd have to expand this textfield right here to show it all. But with this turned On it will always fit neatly into this space. Which is very useful in building slides quickly in Keynote. 
When you make a presentation you probably have a lot of different slides here. But if you want to remove one you may find that you have to either maybe drag it to the end and remember not to use it or delete it. However, you can simply use Skip Slide to skip some slides. Like say I'm making this presentation once where I have plenty of time and then again when I have a shorter amount of time. I can select some slides. I'll select these two here and then go to Slide, Skip Slide. It will skip these two slides. If I'm on this slide here and I advance to the next one it simply skips those. But it doesn't get rid of them. They are still there. I can still actually go to them and edit them and I can easily choose to Unskip them, like that, to bring them back. 
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Now animating things in Keynote is really easy if you use Magic Move. The idea is that you start with a slide like this and you simply duplicate it. I'm going to select it here in the left sidebar, Command D to duplicate, and on this slide I'm going to move an object. So I have the same objects on these two slides. On the first one I'm going to go to Animate and then set the transition to Magic Move. So what will happen here is I transition from one slide to another it just moves things gradually between the two positions. So, for instance, I can bring in this image here and I can make it much larger than the slide and put it right there. Then I'm going to duplicate the slide and on the second one I'm going to have a new position. Then I'll go back to the first slide, add Magic Move, and now that's my transition between the two slides. I can increase the amount of time and I can set the acceleration to None to get the proper effect when I go from one slide to the next. 
You can also animate things using a path. So I have an object here. It could be an image, Clip Art, anything. I'm just going to use a shape. I'm going to add another shape here that's actually a drawn line. So I'm going to create some points here, like that, hit Escape when I'm done. I can double-click and go back in and edit and move these points or create curves by dragging the middle dots like that. So I've got these two things here. I'm going to select them both, like that. Then go to Format, Shapes & Lines, and make Motion Path from Shape. It's going to ask me to Click the shape that creates the path. In this case the line, like that. Then I can see the path that this object will follow. So if I were to Play this and click you can see it follows that path. I can take the path here. Let's change the color to Black so it blends in with the background. I'm also going to move it behind the Shape there. So now it's an invisible path. 
Now another way you can skip slides or go back to previous slides or jump around in all sorts of different ways in your presentation is to add buttons that link to other slides. I'm going to create a shape here. Use a rounded rectangle. Place it down here. I'm just going to call this Skip To End. I'm going to place it here on slide 4. Maybe sometimes I want to skip right from slide 4 to slide 7. So with this selected, and it can be an image, it can be text, it can be a shape, anything, you can go to Format, Add Link and add a link to a slide. Then I'm going to select a specific slide. I'm going to say Slide 7 and then I've got this setup so now when I play I can just advance to the next slide with a click or with a forward arrow. I can also click this button and it will jump to slide 7. So I can actually use this to create a Table of Contents at the beginning or an Index at the end with multiple buttons or links in text to allow me to jump to different parts of the presentation. 
Now a presentation like this obviously has minimal information on the slide. You're expected to, as the speaker, be giving all the details. But it can be hard to remember those. You may have things written on cards if you want. But you're probably presenting, say, on a MacBook hooked up to a projector or large screen. In that case you can see notes on your MacBook screen while the audience sees the presentation. So, go to View and then Show Presenter Notes. Then you can add notes here on the bottom of each slide. In this can be everything that you need to remember when you're talking about this slide. So then when presenting you're going to see your notes. I'm going to do that here. I'm presenting in a window so I'm going to see my presenter display on this little extra window here. But you can set it up so you see your presenter display with your notes and even the next slide on it while the audience sees the actual presentation. You can even Edit the notes while you're presenting. So while you're rehearsing you can refine these notes. 
Now while textboxes in Keynote have a unique feature in Autosizing, charts also have a unique feature. You can animate them. Something you can't do in Pages or Numbers. So here I'm just going to insert a chart. I'm just going to use a basic kind of chart like this and keep the sample data. What I'm going to do here is to click on animate and then for Filled In add an effect. I'm going to add the Wipe effect. You can see it wipes from left to right. But instead I'm going to have it go from bottom to top. If I preview it, it looks like that. Now when you're doing animation with text you can have it build per line or bullet item but with charts you can actually have it build per series or sets or element. Let's do by series here. When we do this the animation will build. First the chart itself and then each series. 
Now when you have a slide like this you may just want to have a solid color background and that's fine. But if you go to Format and just click on the background to make sure the slide is selected here you can change the background to a number of different things like a gradient, for instance, for image fill. But you can also fill choose Dynamic. There are all these different dynamic backgrounds. Like I can choose this one right here, the Jade Cliffs one, and if I scroll down there's a lot I can change. Like I can set the colors to be something different. I can change the movement, the height, the peaks, and all of that to kind of customize it and create this really cool animated background. I can have a different one on each slide. There are a lot of different ones to choose from. You can see here lots of cool different animations and they are all customizable with colors and other properties. 
Now sometimes we have a lot of photos to show and it is tempting to just create a series of slides, each with a photo on it. But you can also just have a single slide and insert an Image Gallery. You can move this around and let's say resize it like this and you can drag a collection of images here. So I'm just dragging from the Finder window into here. I put these in and it's going to insert all of these images. You can see I can go to each one here. I can change the caption for each one as well. When I'm on this slide I can use the arrow keys and it advances to each image in turn and when I get to the end it will advance to the next slide. So now I have greatly simplified my presentation. Instead of having huge set of slides in the middle with images on it I just have one with an image gallery. 
Finally, I'm going to show you an element of a slide that's actually going to give you a live view from your camera. So say you're presenting using your MacBook. So your MacBook's camera is pointed right at you. Meanwhile you're in a big room and there's a big screen behind you. It could be useful sometimes to have you on that screen as well. So you can insert Live Video and it creates this rectangle here. You can move it around. You've got properties here. So, for instance, I can scale it up if I too small there in the middle. I can create a different size mask, like a square or a circle. I can even have it remove the background for me, like that. I can have this on the slide and make it really big if I want. It could be on, say, slides that where it is really important for people to pay attention to what I'm saying. I can have it here on this slide and I can copy it and then let's say go to slide 4 and paste it on this slide as well. So if I'm giving this presentation on this slide I'll appear and the next slide I won't and then here I've got me again but in a different location. So not only can you use those while you're presenting in front of a live audience but you can also use them while you're recording in Keynote. So you can make videos that are kind of like mine, where I'm there in the corner of the video. 
So I hope you find some of these Keynote techniques useful for your next presentation. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 10 Responses to “10 Mac Keynote Tips”

Superjock

2 weeks ago

DANG GARY! I thought I was a master of Keynote. Turns out I'm not. Wow! I learned so many tricks watching this video. Well done, Gary once again, well done.

Dan B

Another excellent video. I'm a long time Keynote user and I learned a few things. One other things that I have found very useful is that when using your iPhone as the remote control, the presenter's notes can show up on the iPhone, so you can move around the room and still have access to your note.

Jonathan

How compatible are Keynote and PowerPoint? Can I open a Keynote presentation in PowerPoint and vice versa?

Gary Rosenzweig

Jonathan: I don't think PowerPoint has any way to open a Keynote presentation. Microsoft just ignores Keynote. So you would want to export the Keynote presentation in PowerPoint format, and then open that exported file in PowerPoint. But it won't look the same as the two apps have different capabilities. What is it you are trying to do, exactly? "Why" do you want to open a Keynote presentation in PowerPoint instead of just presenting it with Keynote?

A lot of business computers are pc’s so they don’t have Keynote. I never used Keynote but based on your video it has a lot of really nice functionality. I guess there’s no way of bringing some of the functionality at least to a PC.

Sarah

Great.. I have learned few more tricks. I am self-taught Keynote user since 2009 at age 78. I produced about 80+ short videos monthly (3-5 minutes) to celebrate my college classmates birthdays and memories adding music from GarageBand on private FB and YouTube sites. I love it! Always more to learn. I have been able to answer my questions. I also make a PDF file so the pictures from the 60's can be viewed individually. Thank you!

Jonathan: It really depends on what "functionality" you want. Usually you use it to make presentations to give in meeting rooms and classrooms. It doesn't matter what other people have, as you are the one presenting.

Al Trivett

Great video Gary! Very helpful to understand the feature gems in Keynote

Sheldon

Thanks bunches

Eric

3 days ago

Great stuff as always!

I have just been trying the Image Gallery facility and am wondering if there is a way to reposition a photo within the frame because the frame size is the same for all photos in the gallery and sometimes parts of a photo are out of frame.