4 Ways To Present From Mac Keynote Over Zoom

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to use Keynote Live to give a presentation online with Zoom. 

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I have a brand new course on using Mac Keynote. Now one of the lessons in that course is about presenting over something like Zoom. I decided that since that is such a hot topic right now that I share the entirety of that lesson with you right here. If you're interested in the rest of the course you can go to courses.macmost.com. There I've got the full course which starts off with the basics of creating a Keynote presentation and then goes on to showing you how use Transitions, Animations, Builds, and different types of media, and Exporting and Sharing your Keynote presentation in a variety of ways. Check it out and here's a coupon to get 40% off the course from its launch until August 28th. So here's the lesson on presenting over Zoom.

So a lot times when we're giving presentations now we're doing them online. One of the most popular tools, of course, is Zoom. You can show your Keynote presentation several different ways using Zoom. But I think the best way is actually to pair Zoom with Keynote Live. First let's look at how to do this using Zoom's screen sharing feature. Now this isn't the ideal way to do it and I'll show you why. 

First, let's go to Zoom here and I'll create a new Zoom meeting and now I'm going to invite somebody. I have another Mac here and I'm going to send an invite to that Mac here so we can act as a participant in this Zoom meeting. So now this Mac is going to join the Zoom meeting. We'll do it without video. It will make it a little less confusing here. Now I'll have to Admit that person to the meeting. What that person sees now is me and of course they would see other participants and things like that. It's a typical Zoom meeting.

But if I'm the presenter I'm going to want to show my Keynote presentation. So one way to do that is to use Share Screen. Now I can simply bring up the Keynote presentation here and have it play and fill the screen and then I can Share that. So in Zoom here I'll click Share Screen and I can choose to share my entire desktop and then hit Share and then I can go over here and you can see the other person is seeing all of this. Now I can play this presentation and they see just about everything that I see except for the controls at the top. This works okay. I can't see my cursor here because Keynote has kind of taken over the cursor ability. But it will work. It's just not ideal.

So let's exit the Keynote presentation and let's do it another way. We'll stop the sharing and instead I'm going to go to Keynote here and I'm going to use a new function that allows me to play in a window. Now the Keynote presentation is playing in a normal window. It can move around. I can resize and make room for other things that I'm doing like controlling the Zoom presentation and everything. Now in the Zoom meeting here I can choose to Share Screen. I can choose the Keynote window rather than the entire screen and share that. Now the other person will only see what's in this window. They're not going to see anything that is overlapping or anything like that. The disadvantage is that Zoom is really just grabbing all the pixels in this window and sending them. So if I shrink it down the window will get very pixelated. Also, if I were to say move it off to the side there it can't grab the portion that it can't see. So it's not quite ideal either. If the other person's bandwidth is slow they might not see all the transitions in a really nice way. I've got really great bandwidth here. Somebody else might not have fast enough bandwidth to actually see cool transitions movements and things.

So let's stop sharing that way and instead let's use Keynote Live to do it. So let's move the Zoom meeting off to the side here and go back to my Keynote presentation. I'll hit Escape and I'm just back in regular Keynote document mode here. I'm going to turn on Keynote Live. What Keynote Live is going to do is it's going to make this presentation available for others to view it while I'm controlling it. So I'll be using two systems. Zoom to send my video and my audio and for me to see and hear other people as well. In Keynote Live a separate system that is just going to play this presentation online and other people will be able to view it.

So I'll hit Continue here and this sets up Keynote Live. Now I can invite viewers. I can also go to more Options here and get a link. It's very similar to setting up Zoom. You just have a link and you share it with someone. So I could just Copy and Paste that link into the Zoom meeting's chat if I wanted to. So I'll invite viewers and I'll do this by email and I'll send out another email. Now on the other I'll see this second email come in. I can select it and I can click the Keynote Live link. Now what that will do is if I have Keynote on my Mac it will launch Keynote and run Keynote Live there. Which is great. That's the best situation. 

But what if the person doesn't have Keynote or their own window. They can't even get Keynote. Well, then the link will open up in a browser. So let's simulate this. I'm going to drag and drop the link here to Safari so it will open up in a browser window. Now I see this little window here that says Welcome to Keynote Live. Now I have two windows open. I've got this window here with Keynote Live and I've got this window here with Zoom. I can shrink that down and do different things with it. I can view them side-by-side. I can bring one in front of the other.

Now here back on my main machine I can choose to start the presentation right away or Play Later. If I choose Play Later notice the Play button changes to green to signify Keynote Live and also there's a number of people that have joined. So let me click here and I'll play Keynote Live and it will start the slideshow. It will take a few seconds to get going. So now you could see I have the current slide of my slideshow and as I advance I see this on the other screen. It even shows the animation. So this is Apple completely handling the presentation here while Zoom handles the audio and video. 

Now I can't see anything but the presentation on my Mac unfortunately. But the audience has the best possible experience. They can even expand this window to make it full screen. Now I can exit the presentation here. It will exit the slideshow and kind of freeze it for everybody else. If I go to Keynote Preferences and allow Mission Control, Dashboard, and others to use the screen at the same time I have a little more options here. So let's continue the slideshow. Now I can actually Alt Tab and bring up things like say the Zoom windows. Now I can interact with people and I just Tab back to Keynote to continue the presentation.

If you want to see your presenter display all you need to do is tap the X key. Now it will show the presenter display to you but the other person will still see the regular slideshow. That's a huge advantage for Keynote Live because you can see your next slide. You can see the time.  You could even see your presenter notes. As a matter of fact if you go up here you can click and customize the presenter display. You can even bring up the Navigator over here and navigate through your slides and they won't see any of that. Hit the question mark here, Shift and the question mark key, to see all the keyboard shortcuts. They're the same in Keynote Live as when you're presenting regularly. You can even press the H key to quickly hide the presentation. They're still seeing the presentation. Then all you need to do is switch back to Keynote and you're back here and you can advance to the next slide and continue on.

Here's one more option. You can go to iCloud.com and in there, if you have your Keynote presentation saved to iCloud Drive, you can access it there. Open it up and it's going to open up in the iCloud.com web version of Keynote. Then when you're in there you can click on the little Tools button there. Click Use Keynote Live and present from Keynote Live in Safari. So when we do that the interesting thing is that we're actually presenting in a window. So now you could see I'm in a window in Safari. I can click and move to the next slide and this is what will be shown over Keynote Live. Yet I'm in a window, not taking over the full screen. I still have the Zoom window open here and I can control things in the Zoom meeting from that while presenting from this window and everybody else is seeing exactly the same thing. They don't have any idea that I'm presenting from the iCloud.com version of Keynote instead of the Keynote app on my Mac. It's the same to them.

Now unfortunately you don't have the presenter display here. You only have some basic keyboard shortcuts that you can get to.So it's not quite as good as presenting from Keynote but it does have the advantage of allowing you to have your Keynote presentation in a window and your Zoom meeting in a window, both on the screen at the same time.

So there are four different options for presenting with Keynote over Zoom. You can do a full screen share in Zoom. You can do a window share in Zoom. You can use Keynote Live from the Keynote app on your Mac. You can use Keynote Live using the iCloud.com version of Keynote. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. So figure out which one will work best for you.