Using Freeform As a Presentation Tool

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can use FreeForm for Presentations.

Now your Mac comes with two free Presentation Tools. That's right, two! The one you probably think of first, of course, is Keynote. Which is the king of presentation tools and it is still the best option in most cases. But there's another free app that comes with your Mac that let's you do presentations. The main purpose of FreeForm is to be able to combine text and graphics for brain storming and other purposes and it works great for that. But it also has a special presentation mode that creates presentations that look distinctively different than the one in Keynote. 

So for instance let's go into this board I created right here. In this board I've just placed a lot of different, well, what looks like slides. I've got some title text, I've got some bullet points, and I've got a graphic. I've just put one on top of the other, on top of the other. Just ten different slides in different positions here on this one board. Now you can imagine, of course, just zoom in on what looks like one slide and you could use this to present. Then you can slide over to the next one and then keep going like that. But, there's actually a built in way to do that, that's kind of neat. That's Scenes. 

The way you get to Scenes is you click this little Star Icon here at the bottom. Then you get these three controls, Left, Right, and List here of Scenes. You can see here I've added ten scenes to this presentation. When I go to the first one it actually jumps to that first slide. Go to the next one and it jumps to the next one. You can see how it actually animated going from one to the other just as if you're moving. I can use these Arrows to go to each slide and go back, like that. It creates a really simple, easy presentation. The cool animation is the movement from one position in the board to another position. So if you like that look then Freeform may be the tool for you. But the other advantage of doing a presentation in Freeform is just the way you make it. 

This is just one long board here. If you'd rather play around with your graphics, ideas, and things like that in terms of one large board then Freeform has that advantage over Keynote where everything is on individual slides and you're really just working with one slide at a time. So, of course, you can add text and graphics to the board like you want. But how do you setup these slides, called Scenes here, in Freeform. 

Well, what you first do is get the actual part of the board that you want to view right in the middle there. It helps if you don't have the Sidebar on so you can really use the whole space. As a matter of fact if you plan on presenting in Full Screen Mode you want to make sure you go to Full Screen Mode right now so that you can get everything looking just like you want. After you get the screen perfectly positioned, like this, which includes just not the position but also zooming. So you can use two fingers on the trackpad, for instance, or you can scroll with your mouse and zoom in and out, use these controls here to get it to the right size and right position. Then you click here, you can click Add Scene, you it will add this to the Scene List. You have Keyboard Shortcuts for this of course. Under View you've got Scenes and Add Scene is simply Shift Command S. So you can add this Scene and then go to where the next scene is and add the next scene. I'm going to show you an even easier way to do this in a few minutes. Once you have all of your scenes listed here you can rearrange them by simply dragging them around in this list. You can also click on the more button here and Rename it. So you don't have to stick with Scene 3. You can actually rename this as the name of the slide. That way you can jump around in the Scene List very easily. Also if the scene isn't perfectly centered or zoomed in you can simply go to the new positioning that you want and simple Replace Scene and it will replace this one with whatever you've got showing here. 

Now I've chosen the most boring kind of Freeform Board to make into a presentation. It's just a big linear list. I might as well have done this in Keynote. But it becomes more interesting if you actually were too make it kind of non-linear. For instance if I were to grab these two slides here and move them to the right and maybe move these up then as this is 1, 2, 3, and then 4, 5, 6, and the movement would go in that direction. But I can also just skip ahead using the Scene List here. Now note as I've already setup these scenes everything is kind of out of wack. So I would actually have to reposition the scene to get everything right. One of the things you want to be careful of.

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Let's look at another example here where everything is non-linear. I've got this for here and I basically have a little title in the middle and then I've got six slides, three on each side. It creates a nice little thing that you can print out. You may have even designed this to print out as a page. But I've also setup scenes here. So I've got the scene here at the beginning that zoomed in on the title in the middle. Then the first scene after that goes to the top left and I can have named this something better here by Renaming it so I know when I want to jump to that I can. Then the next one goes to the slide at the top right and so on. I can use these arrow keys to go through it. An easier way to navigate, by the way, is to go to View and then Scenes. You'll see here Option Command and then the right square bracket and then the left square bracket. So you can just keep your hands on the keyboard and go from slide to slide to slide. At the end I have a scene that basically zooms back out to entire thing which highlights another example of doing the presentation in Freeform instead of Keynote. I've only created this title graphic once but I use it at the beginning for Scene 1 right here and I use it at the end because it shows you everything. The same is true for all of these slides. They are all included here at the end. But if I were to actually change something, like I found a typo in one of these, and made a change then it would effect all of the scenes where this text appears. That's not true for Keynote. In Keynote if you reuse an element across three different slides and you wanted to change it, you would have to change it on each of those three slides. 

Now you don't just have to do presentations like that. You can do simple slide shows. Like, for instance, here I've just imported sixteen different photos from the Photos App. I just dragged them from the Photos App into here and I manipulated them around and used some of the tools here for arranging them and aligning them. So I can quickly get them into a nice grid, like this. Now I can created a presentation using Scenes. In fact I've already set some of this up. So the first scene here shows everything. The second scene, right here, that goes to this first photo. Each one goes to each photo. This creates a really nice look to it as I'm flipping through all of these photos including going to the fourth one and then down to left to the first one on the next row. Plus, I can jump very easily back to this original scene here. Unfortunately there's no way to link, like create a link from this image here to a scene. That would be really nice. Maybe something Apple can add in the future. But, for now you can actually use the little list here to jump quickly to a photo.

Now I've deleted all of the scenes here for this board so I can show you how you can very quickly build scenes with some Keyboard Shortcuts. So when you select something, like say this photo right here, there is the Option under View to Zoom to the selection, Shift Command 0 (zero). When you do that remember you also have, under View, Scenes Shift Command S to add a Scene. So you can use this very quickly to build scenes. I'm going to select all of these. So I'll have 16 graphics here. I'm going to do Shift Command Zero and then Shift Command S. That adds the first scene. Then I'm going to select just the first photo here, Shift Command Zero, Shift Command S. Then I'm going to select this one, Shift Command Zero, Shift Command S and then  I'm going to continue to do it to all of these to quickly add all 16 of these to the Scenes List. So now you can see I have 17 scenes here. The first one being everything and if I want that to be the last scene as well, I can simple select All and also add that as a new scene at the end. So now I can have the end scene and the first scene be the same. 

Remember Zooming is part of it as well as positioning. So another way to use this is just to have a single photo or just a group of photos but have the scene setup so that they go to different parts of the photo. So here I've got the first scene setup to just bring the entire photo to the center. But the second scene will actually zoom in more on the face, and then the tail, hands, and then back out. You can imagine I can have, you know, a bunch of different photos on this one board and have a bunch of different scenes that go to different areas inside of a photo. 

You can do more than pictures. )You can do videos here. So I've got these videos. I can select this one, Shift Command 0 (Zero) and then Shift Command S and add that as a scene. Select this next one Shift Command 0 (zero) and Shift Command S to add that as a scene. Then it can very easily go to a video scene here and then click the Play button to play that video. So you can have it as a collection of videos that has a nice feel to it as you use the Keyboard Shortcuts as you go from scene to scene you can see it move over. One thing about having movement like this in a presentation is that it can often help your audience kind of get their bearings to where you are in the presentation. You know if they see this at the beginning they know you are going to show four different videos here. If they see you travel from one to the other across the board they kind of know where they are and kind of get this geographical view of what you're presenting. 

There are a lot more things you can include in a board. For instance you can include a links to webpages. Links to music in the Music App or to locations in the Maps App so you can actually switch between different apps using both links. You can jump to them. Also you may have noticed there are options to Print using the scenes. So if you like to create presentations on your Mac and you're looking for something different than what you are used to in Keynote, maybe give Freeform Scenes a try. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.