Creating a Basic Presentation In Keynote

Learn how to use Keynote to create a simple presentation that includes text and images. You can choose from a variety of templates, and then add slides from that template. You can populate the slides with your own information and then play back the presentation.

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com.  Let's take a look at creating a basic presentation in Keynote.
Using Keynote version 6 let's look at how to create a standard slide show.
When you start off you first get asked to choose a basic theme. You have two options here; Standard or Wide. So if you are presenting on a wide screen say like modern television you are going to do Wide. But for old fashioned business presentations you will just want to stick with Standard 4 x 3. 
Let's use that. You can scroll through it and pick out a theme here. But for our purposes let's choose something simple like this Gradient theme. You will always be given on example slide here and you can just double click in any text box here on the slide to enter in text.
To add another slide you simply go to the plus button here on the bottom left. Click it and you get shown a bunch of templates for slides that you can use. You can start off with a complete blank slide or you can use one that already has something in it. These will change depending upon which theme you chose.
So let's just choose one that has an image like this one. It will add itself here. Now we see two slides. You can change the view here on the left to have the Navigator here like this. We can get rid of the Navigator. We can do a light table to show us which slides are there and double click to jump to it. Or we can do an outline of all the slides. Probably the most useful is just the Navigator here. It allows you to do just about everything.
We can click on a slide to jump to it. Then we can edit what is in there. We can also use the zoom here to zoom out. So let's shrink that a bit so we can see the entire slide. Let's do it even more here. So now it is easy for us to edit this and we can type some text and now we want to put an image here.
To get an image here we want to click the little button here that allows us to grab something from our photo library. We can also drag and drop from the Finder over this image right in there. But let's just select something from there and now we've got that photo placed in there. 
If we double click on any image we can change its cropping here and change its size if we wanted to by switching between these two buttons in these two different modes. So you can adjust an image like that.
You also, in the Format area over here (if you don't see that press Format here), you can change the style. So you can add a border around the image if you want. You can do a shadow reflection. You can use one of the preset styles that is here, like that.
We can also go into image and change a bunch of different things about it. For instance enhance it or change its exposure or some other things with colors. We can even rotate the image here. Go to Arrange and there is different things we can do to align it and also manually set its size, position, rotation, and even lock it if we don't want it to be editable anymore on this slide.
Now for the ultimate versatility you want to add a blank slide like that one right there which just gives you the background. In here we can add a variety of different elements. For instance I can add a text element right here. Just select one and I can move this around and enter in text. When I select it, in the Format bar, I've got style for the box and I've got things like Font size over here under text. I can put this anywhere that I want. I can add a shape and I can set its style and all sorts of different properties for it. I can add media. So I can add another photo and then I can shrink the photo down and make it fit in place there. I can add a chart. I can add a table. So a lot of different things that I can do with just this. I can even use the shapes to add basic arrows and things like that.
As you are working on your presentation you may need to rearrange things. You can drag and drop these thumbnails on the left like that. You can even group them underneath by dragging kind of a little bit to the right. So now that slide is now grouped under there. You can select multiple slides and drag them around. There is a lot of different things that you can do here just by rearranging these slides.
It is also very useful to set a slide to skip. So I can control click on a slide here and say skip and you can see it shrinks it down. That is useful if you have a long presentation and you want to give a short version of it. You can set a bunch of different slides to skip just before you give the presentation. Now if you want to play you simply hit the play button here and it will fill the screen and then I'm going to use the space bar to advance. You can see it will jump from one to three right there. I use the Escape key to escape out of it and I can turn skipping off.
You can also use the Format bar over here when you have, instead of an object selected, you just select the background and now you can revert this to one of the basic templates there. You can also add some basic elements. Also you can set the background here. So there is a lot you can do to bring an image in or set a gradient or something else like take the fill away completely or set it to a solid color. So you are not just stuck with the same background over all the slides.
So there is a look at some of the basics to get you started in creating presentations in Keynote.

Comments: 4 Responses to “Creating a Basic Presentation In Keynote”

Paul

10 years ago

Very nice Gary, thanks.

Shirley Allan

Creating Keynote presentations is helpful in learning the new Pages as they are so similar but I'm stumped on turning Wrap Off entirely for a document.

Line

Really like the keynote Presentation. It seems easier. Thanks

Patricia K

Your presentations are clear, precise and easy to follow. With your permission, I will share selected videos with our students and teachers.
Thanks Gary.

Comments Closed.

Creating a Basic Presentation In Keynote

Comments: 4 Responses to “Creating a Basic Presentation In Keynote”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information