Learn How To Use Mac Keynote In 5 Minutes

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to get started with Keynote in just 5 minutes.

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So Keynote is a great presentation app from Apple. You can get it from the Mac App Store for free if you don't already have it. If you've never used it before or it's been awhile here's a quick 5 minute overview to get you started. 

When you start a new Keynote presentation you need to pick a template. You can choose Standard or Wide. Most TV's today, of course, are wide so you're going to want to use that. You can pick from one of these templates here. I'm just going to choose this one. Then you're going to want to zoom out to fit the slide into your screen so you can see everything. You can see here I get a default slide. I'm going to use this one here. Just double click any place and you can enter in the text. It's going to use the default fonts and other styles from the template. But you can select the text just like you can in any other app. Go to the Sidebar here and you can change the text to be any font or any size or style that you want.

To add another slide click the Add Slide button and you can choose from a variety of slides that are from that template. In this case I'm going to choose a Title bullet and Photo slide here. I get an image and some more text. Let me enter in some text. You can see here this is a bullet list which is fairly common to use in presentations. This is an image here. I can click this little button to select an image from my Photos app or I can drag and drop a photo into the slot. Let me just select an image here and then you can double click it and you can resize it. Move it around. Hit Done.

A lot of times you're going to add a slide that's a blank slide because you're going to add your own elements to it. So when you have a blank slide you can use any of these buttons here to add different types of things. So for instance I can click Media and add photos. Let me add a photo here. Then I'll close the Media window. I can resize the photo just you can in most other apps. I can position it like that double clicking and then hitting Done. I can do some different styles and things on the right. I can click Image and I can make adjustments to the image or I can replace the image with a new one.

Let me add some text here. Just add a simple text box. I'll type something in it. Then I can select it. Let's make it much larger than that and maybe Bold. Then I can drag it and put it somewhere. You can add transitions between slides. So the key is to go to the first slide and then click on the Animate sidebar here. Add an effect. You can click Preview to preview a transition and then click the transition to add it. A lot of times there are options you can select. A transition is between the current slide and the next one. So if I wanted to add a transition between slide 1 and 2,  I'd go to Slide 1. Click on Animate. I'd click Add an Effect and I select the effect there. 

You could also select builds for different things. So, for instance, in this slide I could have this text appear after the slide appears. Go to Animate and then Build in, Add an Effect and then choose something there. Then that will transition in. You could look at the properties of that transition. If you have something like a bullet list and you choose an effect like Move In here. I can adjust that to be from right to left instead. I can also have it delivered, instead of all at once, by bullet. So now when I preview you could see each bullet item moves in. If I click Build Order I'll see all of the elements that are being built and I could rearrange them. I could also select them and change things like when they start. In this case each one is set to start on Click. So as I give my presentation I'll have to click to show each bullet which is what I want. But you could also have it do things like appear after the previous build. So they'd all kind of march in one after the other.

Now that I have several slides I can arrange them here by dragging them around in the left sidebar. I can even drag one underneath another slide so kind of group them together. To present all you need to do is go to Play and then Play Slideshow. You can also go to Customize Presenter Display. When you do that it will show all the screens, such as you MacBook screen and the TV you're hooked up to. You can decide which one shows the slideshow and which one is the presenter display. The presenter display will show things like the current slide, maybe the next slide, your notes, and other things like that. 

So, for instance, now when I present on my MacBook Screen I would see the current slide and the next slide and my notes at the bottom. For notes if you go to View and Show Presenter Notes you'll see them at the bottom here and you could have notes for every slide. Very useful for giving presentations because only you will see them on your MacBook. They won't be shown on the main screen. 

Now that you're done you can go to File, Save to save the presentation. You could also Export, say to Powerpoint if you need to give the presentation on a Windows machine. You could even export your presentation as a video or create a little mini website from the presentation that you could present on pretty much any computer.