How To Draw Attention To Text In Keynote

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at different ways to draw attention to individual words and phrases in Keynote slides.

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So Keynote has all sorts of animations and transitions that do different things between slides and draw attention to different elements on a slide. But it really doesn't have much for drawing attention to individual words and phrases. Let's take a look at some different ways to do that.

Here I've got a typical slide with a bullet list. I want to draw attention to some words. Let's say I want to draw attention to these words right here. I can do that really simply right here in this slide by just changing the style of the text. So with the Format sidebar under Text I can go and do something like make this text Bold. It could just be as simple as that. It gives a little bit more attention to this specific text. Now I like the use colors. So instead of just making this text bold which barely brings it out from the rest of the text you can change its color. So we'll go back to plain text and we'll change the text color to something else. I'll use, say, a bright yellow here and now it makes that text stand out even more.

But here's an idea I like even better. Instead of making the text stand out more by changing its color make the other text fade back by changing the color of everything else. So I'm going to select all the text here and I'm going to change the text color to instead of white to the lightest shade of gray in the pallet there. Then I'm going to go and change this text back to white. All the text is still  perfectly readable but now the three words I want really stand out and I didn't have to resort to a specific color to do it. 

Using any of these techniques you can also draw multiple phrases. So I can also make this text white here and this text white and this text white. It draws out the most important points in an easy way for people to glance at the slide and see.

Now so far nothing with animation. What if I want something to change on the slide to draw attention to the text. Unfortunately none of the transitions and animations will really work on bits of text. They work on objects. So like this entire block of text here. But you can work with it by making two copies of this. So I could simply use Edit Copy or Command C and then Edit Paste, Command V. Now I have two copies of this here. For the second copy I'm going to select this text and make it white. I could have used any of those other techniques, like say using a different color for the text there. 

Now I can position this right on top of the other text. Fortunately Snapping will snap this directly in place. So now you can't even tell that there's one overlaying the other. It looks like just one piece of text. But we do have two separate pieces of text there. Now we can use an animation to go from one to the other. So I'll click Animate here and I'll use a Build In effect. Add An Effect here and I can add something. Let's say let's use a Wipe. If I Preview that you can see the Wipe will reveal that piece of white text. It's actually revealing the entire second block of text. But it all matches perfectly except the white words here over the light gray words.

So there are various different effects here that will work. For instance Wipe works really well. Dissolve will work. But other ones won't work so well. For Instance if I tried Drift and Scale you can see it kind of like throws up this other text box on top of the first one. Most of these will do that. But some, the ones that overlay text perfectly on top of other pieces of text, will work. So you can play around with these to see which ones will work in this kind of situation.

Now to get more options what you want to do is instead of having the entire block of text repeated like that you want to have another piece of text that is just the text that changes. So I'm going to select this text here and copy it. Now I'm going to create a new text box. You can see it here. I'm going to paste into that that piece of text. Now notice it's a bullet item there because that was the style of the text I copied. So I want to go to Format and I want to go down to Bullets & Lists and change the style to None. Now it's just that text there. I can now drag this around and position it right over the existing text. It's harder to get it perfect. What you probably want to do is zoom in a lot to be able to line it up perfectly. You could see I did a pretty good job there. Play with it and just get it close enough with everything zoomed in and then when you zoom back out you won't notice that it is one piece of text on top of the other. 

Now this piece of text that's on top I can go and change it. So I can change its color for instance to make it a brighter color or a different color completely. Now when I go to Animate and I use one of these effects, I can use just about anything I want. So, for instance, Drift & Scale, Fly In, Pop, Spin, all sorts of different things will work that wouldn't have worked if I had the entire text block copied a second time. Now on top of that I can now go and use some other things. If I go, instead of to Build In, if I go to Action and Add An Effect I'll have a different set of effects here. Some of them are for emphasis. These work really well with text. So I could do Blink for instance. I can do Bounce. I can do Flip.

Now what might be useful here is to actually get rid of the background text that's there. So let me move this away for a minute. You could see where it says sites you trust in gray, well I could go to Format here and I could do things as simple as just changing it to the same as the background color so now it's invisible yet the rest of the text, in this case a period that hangs out there at the end is still in the right position. But I can also go and click on the color wheel here and change the opacity to zero. So it really doesn't matter what color the text is. Keynote has this weird thing where it kind of will outline anything set to an opacity set exactly to zero. So sometimes 1% works even better. But now I can move this sites you trust back here and go to Animate and use one of these Actions here to do various things and I don't have to worry about there being that kind of shadow underneath it.

Some of these effects even work well if they're prolonged. For instance let's use Jiggle here. If I wanted to I could change the duration to 60 seconds. So pretty much maybe the entire time I'm talking about this slide. Now when I play this presentation here and I click you can see it just starts and it goes for 60 seconds. If I wanted to I could select this and click Build Order and change it to After Transition. Now as soon as I go to this slide it immediately starts to jiggle and will continue to jiggle the entire time. You could also change this to Blink which you would think would blink really quickly. But since I set this now to 60 seconds it's going to do it for 4 blinks over 60 seconds which is going to be slow. You could speed it up quite a bit and preview it there. You could see it kind of fades in and fades out. It's not a pure on/off blink. So it really works pretty well. This will work well if you have black text underneath white text. But it also works well if you have white text over the gray text from the original text box.

If you don't like the idea of creating another text box on top of this one, one thing you can do is to simply duplicate the slide. So select the slide here on the left, go to Edit and Duplicate Selection or Command D. It creates a second version of the slide. The second version of the slide I can change the color of this text now to something else to draw emphasis. This can sometimes be a little easier to deal with especially if you want to draw emphasis to multiple words. 

So on this slide I can just change this to white. On the next slide I have other words that are also white until I have the four pieces I want to emphasize all white on the fifth slide. The way things are setup now you go from one slide to the next and it simply lights up that piece of text. But if you want it to dissolve into it you can go to Animate and with the slide selected with a piece of text you can Add An Effect and you can do Dissolve. Dissolve will work to actually have that text slowly appear. Most of the other stuff here really won't work very well. For instance if I was to do, say, Fade and Move, you can see it does it for the entire slide. Only Dissolve works really well. 

Wipe also works really well. Since that's the only thing that's changing so it kind of wipes that part in. Another things that works really well is Magic Move. Because with Magic Move there's a checkbox for Fade Unmatched Objects. So if nothing else is changing between these two slides all you'll have is a nice fade. It's kind of basically the same thing as Dissolve but I think it looks a little bit better. Now Magic Move will do something else for you. Notice that there's the Match here and it has By Word or By Character. So this will deal with specific pieces of text. If I change it to By Character what it's going to do is try to change the text by moving the characters around. 

Now I've got the same exact characters from slide to slide. But what if I were to take these letters here and scramble them like just by copying one letter and putting it there, another letter putting it there and continuing to do that until it's completely scrambled. So you can see here that anybody looking at this slide may look at these words here and say, what's that! Right. At the right time, with the help of Magic Move and having By Character turned on, this is what you get when you advance to the next slide. So you can see how it unscrambles those letters to reveal the correct words. It doesn't keep emphasis there on those words but it draws attention to it momentarily which may be what you want. 

This one last one I want to show you doesn't work on individual words but it does work for bullet lists. So, let's say you want to have each one of these revealed one at a time. You can select this and you can have it Build In, Add An Effect, and add various different effects like, for instance, Blur and you can say By Bullet. Now when you play this you can see as you advance with each slide, each bullet comes in one at a time. But if you want emphasis on the current bullet that you're talking about changed to By Highlighted Bullet which is kind of a misleading name there because you're thinking how exactly do you highlight that. But it would be better described as By Bullet with Highlight. So now when you play this and I advance it will do that same transition to show each bullet item but when it goes to the next one it's going to fade back the previous ones. So only the one that you're talking about is highlighted. So it helps draw emphasis on that particular bullet item.

So there's some ideas that you can use if you want to highlight words and phrases in your next Keynote presentation.