17 Keynote Tips for Mac

Here are some handy tips for using Keynote on your Mac. You can fill shapes or text with images, add links, record audio per slide, and insert math equations. You can also create animations that swap letters or draw lines. You can even use Keynote to create simple web site. That and much more!

Check out 17 Keynote Tips for Mac at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at a collection of useful and creative Keynote tips.
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So when you bring an image into Keynote you drop it in and it's the same shape as the actual original image. But let's say you wanted it to be a different shape. Like maybe make this circular or something. Go to Format, Image and choose Mask With Shape and choose one of the basic shapes. For instance I could choose Oval and then it would create this oval shape here. I could stretch it, reposition it, hit Done, and now I have an image inside of an oval. I don't have to settle for those basic shapes. I could actually select any shape I want. So, for instance, I could go here, select a T-shirt shape, stretch this out to the size I want. Then select both that and the image, holding the Shift key down and select both. Then go to Format, Image, and I could choose Mask with Selection. Now you could see it fits in here. When you're doing this you could still go to Format here and do things like choose a border.
Now you could also do the opposite. You could create a shape here and then with that shape already there instead of choosing a Fill, like a color, I could go to Image Fill and then drag the image to this little tile here. I could drag right into here and kind of get the same thing. But as a bonus since it's a shape I can now double click on it and actually enter characters in it and do other things I can do with shapes.
Now you can also fill in text using images. So select the text here. It works best with a bold font like this. Then change text color to Image Fill. Then drag and drop something to this tile. So I'll drag the same image there and you can see it fills it in with that image. If I go and choose Advanced Image Fill I can then tint that with a color. Also I could choose different scaling options for the image.
Now another things you could do with images is instead of adding them one by one to a slide you could select several of them. I'm going to select a set of six images here and I'm going to drag them to thumbnails here on the left. When I do it's going to create those slides and put the images on those slides. One problem, and I think it's kind of a bug, is that you get the default text for one of the slide types here. The title and bullets for some reason. It's no big deal since if you don't fill those in they're just blank anyway. You can see the slide doesn't have anything behind it. But if you wanted to you could go and choose Edit Master Slides, go to the Titles and Bullets slide here, select those items there and Delete them from the Master and then they're gone from these slides completely.
Now if you just want to have a slideshow showing different images you don't have to go and create different slides for each one. Instead you can go to Media and add an Image Gallery. This creates this Image Gallery element. Then drag and drop the images onto the Image Gallery and you have on a single slide a little slideshow. You can change width and height. You have these arrow keys and the dots here for while you're editing. But when you actually play the presentation there's nothing there. You just click to advance to the next image, all the time remaining on the same slide. You can even have different captions for each one. You see under Format, Gallery, Caption you can select individual captions per image or the same caption for all images. Then you can change the caption here for each image by editing the text at the bottom. You also have this list of images here and you could Add, Remove, or Rearrange them.
Now you may already know that you can go to Play, Record Slideshow. Play your slideshow through talking to the microphone on your Mac and do a complete recording of your slideshow. But another way to do that is to record narration on a per slide basis. So here I am on slide 1. I can go to Insert and select Record Audio. If I'm going to do this a lot I'd probably set keyboard shortcut in System Preferences for Record Audio. Then I get this little recording interface here. I can record something, (this is slide number one), I could stop and you could see I could preview, I could edit and trim that, I can continue recording. It's a whole little recording interface. When I'm done I can  hit Insert and I get this little Speaker icon here that won't appear on the actual slide. But under Format, Audio I can set it to either start on Click or start Automatically. So if I do that for each slide and also for each slide under Animate set it to start the transition automatically I could actually have it play the audio on the slide automatically and advance to the next slide when it's done after a delay, if I like. So I can record  the audio of the presentation on a slide-by-slide basis instead of one recording for the entire thing.
Now you don't have to settle for a completely linear presentation going from slide 1, to 2, to 3. You can create links inside your presentation to jump around. Here I have a slide that has three buttons on the bottom. You can see I've got three slides that I want to jump to for each one of those. So I can select this first button here, and you can also select text inside of a text field. I can do Format, Add Link, Slide  and I can set it to a specific slide. So I can have this go to slide 2. Then I'll use the keyboard shortcut, Command K, and go to slide 3 for this one, and this one Command K to go to slide 4. So now when I run the presentation I can jump right to a section by clicking on a button instead of having to advance through all the slides. 
Likewise you could also put a button on each one of these, as I have here, and this one, if I click here, it takes me to the Link type or I can do Command K and I can say go back to slide 1. I can also say Last slide viewed which makes it act like a back button. So I can take this, Copy and Paste it in each one of these slides. Now I can go and jump to this section. Go back. This section. Go Back. This section. Go Back.
The advantage of using Last Slide Viewed is maybe you go to the section for multiple slides. So slide 1 might go to a slide but you may have a slide 20 that also goes to the same slide. The back button would work to go back to 1 or go back to 20, whichever one you came from.
A fun transition to use when you have text on a slide like this and you want to change it to something else, like that, is to use Magic Move. Magic Move, of course, moves items around on the screen. But with text it does something special. I'm going to add the Magic Move effect to this slide here. But I'm going to, instead of by object, I'm going to say by character. What it will do is rearrange the characters in any text that appears on both slides and it creates a cool effect like this. It even works better when only one word is different. So you have this and you change one word like that. That works best when you have a lot of letters shared by the word that's changing.
Now you can do charts in Keynote. You can do 2D charts or 3D charts. Let's say we do a 3D chart like this and that's just fine on its own. But you can animate this as well. If you go to Animate, Build In and Add an Effect you see that you can add a variety of effects. Some of them are just for charts. So we can preview this one here, for instance. When I select that I can also change the delivery. Instead of All at Once I can have them Cascade where they appear like that or I can have them go By Series or By Set.
Now we have a lot of different shapes that we can add to a presentation. One of the cool things you can do is instead of having the shape appear or fade-in in a normal transition you could use the Line Draw to create it. So first make sure it has a border. So I'm going to go to Format here and then Style and then change the border to a Line. Then I'm going to get rid of the Fill here so it's just a Line like that. Now when I go to Animate, Add an Effect, and select Line Draw. Now it will draw like this. I can select it to go Clockwise, Counterclockwise, change the Duration, and everything.
Now let's say you've worked hard to create some text like this setting a lot of different style properties. Then you want to use that again. You can, of course, use Styles and create a specific style for that. But if you want something really quick what you can do is go to Format and choose Copy Style. Then go to the other piece of text, select that, go to Format, Paste Style and you can see it changes the text to match that style. If you want to use it a lot you can always go to Format, and then Advanced, Set as Default Text Box Appearance. Set that and then when you create a new text box it automatically starts with those settings.
When you have a lot of things on a slide, you could see I've got several items here, sometimes I can be hard to see exactly what's there and what's in front of one object and behind the other. You can go to View and then Show Object List. Then you get this list of every object in the order that it appears. So, for instance, if this apple here is behind the picture I can move it in this list up and it's in front of the picture. This is also handy, maybe, for spotting any empty text boxes and things that you're not using or maybe are off the slide. You could even filter this list here and search it.
If you need to work with math equations you can go to Insert, Equation here and use one of two different standard types for typing out equations. For instance this here gets translated into that. I can insert it in and you can see here the result that I get. It would be very difficult to build this otherwise.
Now I know that a lot of people now need to show their presentations live over things like Zoom, Goggle Meet, Skype, FaceTime. You can do that using ScreenSharing. But the problem is that when you play the presentation it takes over all of the screens on your Mac. However, a new feature in the latest version of Keynote, version 10.1, is the ability to play your slideshow in the window. So the Keynote window is now showing the presentation instead of it taking over the screen. Of course you could shrink that window down and show your presentation inside of here. It  makes it much easier to share something online or show a presentation while doing something completely different in another screen or having another window from another app open at the same time.
As my last tip did you know you could use Keynote to build a simple website. So you take a presentation like this where you have buttons that navigate to all the different screens and back buttons and everything like that. Go into Document, change it so the presentation type is Links Only. So you can't just click anywhere to advance to the next slide or webpage. Then go to File, Export to, HTML. This will export a whole website into a folder. So we'll export this. Let's Hide Keynote there. I have this folder here. You can see I've got an Assets folder and I've got the Index .html folder. If I double click on the Index folder it opens it up in Safari or your default browser and these buttons work. So I can jump to a page and jump back and etc. So you can create a very simple website that just has some basic information on it. Of course you're going to need a web host. Somewhere where you can upload this set of files so it acts as a website.
Hope you found these tips useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 12 Responses to “17 Keynote Tips for Mac”

Will

6 months ago

Thanks. Very good.

Leonard Smith

Great TIPS!!!

Darren

Gary, Thank you! I’m a teacher. Your tips have made making virtual teaching have so much more impact! Because of your tips, my Keynotes make my students say WOW again!

Fred H

Gary… Great tips. Since migrating to a Mac 10 years ago I’ve always used Pages for my presentations. Didn’t want to take the time to learn another app, I think. This makes me seriously reconsider learning and using Keynote. Thanks.

Thim Fook, Law

5 months ago

Thanks Gary, for another VERY useful tips on Keynotes!

Regards.

sury

Very good. Thanks, Gary

Bruce Holland

Hi Gary
A great video! About 1.59 in you talk about a nice “bold font”. I really like this. What is it and how can I get it on my macbook?

Gary Rosenzweig

Bruce: That’s Cooper Black, probably one of the most famous fonts of all time. Search “Cooper Black Font” and you’ll find various places you can purchase it.

David R

Hi Gary,
I have quick work around for bug in tip 4. I use this all the time. Once you drop the images and the slides are populated, Change Master is available in the Inspector. Select and from drop down, select blank format, this will remove all of the slide formats for ones just created.

Scott Rogers

is there a way to change the opacity of an image (photo) that is on a Keynote Slide? I want to “soften” up or lightened the background picture (jpg)

Scott: Yes. Select the image and go to the Format sidebar, Style. Then look for Opacity. You can put a rectangle under it with a solid color if you need. I also like to instead put a rectangle over it and set the rectangle’s opacity instead.

Gary, please ignore my comment from 37 minutes ago. I found the slider bar…. dahhhhh, right in front of me.

17 Keynote Tips for Mac

Comments: 12 Responses to “17 Keynote Tips for Mac”

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