Showing Mac Keynote Presentations In a Live Meeting

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to present from Keynote while in an online meeting. 

Keynote and other presentation apps, of course, existed long before we did online meetings. They were great for presenting in a meeting room or an auditorium. But now most of the time we use them to show things over an app like Zoom. You can use them for that but the default presentation mode in Keynote is not the best way to do it. 

Here I am in Keynote. I've got a simple presentation here. If I were to play this it would take up the entire screen and then I could just share my screen over Zoom. But it is using my entire screen then. Plus I may get other things like Notifications, and other elements on the screen. I won't be able to access other windows if I need to switch to something else or show something else. So there is a better way to do it but it is not labeled as something that you would use in an online meeting. It's simply this here. If you go to Play there's a toggle between Full screen and In Window.  So you want to switch to In Window. 

What happens now is when you present it presents in a regular window, like this. The rest of your windows are still available. You can see the Desktop. I can see the File Icon right here. I can switch to the presentation itself. I can bring up other window like for instance my Notes App. Just like you are working normally on your Mac. But you may think, well, if I'm doing that everybody is going to see these other windows. They are going to see my menubar and the Dock and Notifications that appear.

But that's not the case! If you just share this window, which is what you should be doing. So, for instance, using Zoom as an example but it is more or less the same in any other meeting app, I'm going to start a New Meeting here. Now with my new meeting going I'm going to start a Screen Share. I'm going to click here and you can see here it allows me to share my various displays. I have two displays here. I also can share Application Windows and there's the window that is showing my presentation. Even if you haven't started the presentation before you started Zoom you can simply start the presentation in a window and then go to Share and share that window. 

I'm going to select it and click Share. I'm only going to be sharing that window. You can see here the Zoom toolbar has that window being shared. Notice what it is sharing here. It is not sharing the rest of my Desktop at all. It's not sharing anything covering that window. In fact if I bring, say, the Keynote window here to the front you can see it is still sharing the window underneath it. If I open up another app, like for instance Notes, you can see it still just sharing the Keynote presentation window. It's not sharing the Notes window or anything else going on. So I can feel free to use my Mac like I want but I can still be sharing this presentation here. As I move things around it doesn't affect it. If I go back to the window that I'm sharing here I can advance to the next slide. You can see how it shows the next slide there to everybody. Just that. Nothing else. 

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Even if you think, well I don't really need to show anything else, I can just have it presented in the whole screen and just show the slides. That's fine. But Keynote has the very important Presenter Display. When you're presenting in a window you can show Presenter Display, like this, and it comes up in this other window here. Notice this window isn't being shown either even though it is a Keynote window. So you can now use the Presenter Display to navigate around, jumping around in the slides as you want. You can see the Time. You can see what the next slide is here. You've got some configuration options as well. You can even jump to a slide if you have a really long presentation, for instance. So it's not just about keeping other windows out of the way and making sure you're only presenting the Keynote slides. It's also about giving yourself the ability to access other things and control your presentation as you like. 

Also, if you look closely at the green box there at the bottom notice you can see my pointer inside of the slide. Everybody else is going to see that too. This is a preview here of what everybody sees. So I can use my Mac's pointer as a pointer for the presentation. You can see it here. In fact, you can actually go into System Settings and then go to Accessibility and then Display and then if you scroll down you'll see Pointer. You can change the Pointer size and you can change the color, make it something else like that. Now notice that is reflected here in the view that everybody is seeing. So you don't need a third party app or anything like that to make your pointer bigger and a color. It's very easy to click the Reset Button to reset colors and then drag it over to normal when you are done. 

However, different online meeting apps may have functionality that helps you point things out as well and of course has functionality that allows you to show yourself via a webcam at the same time. So different apps are going to do that differently. Keynote has that functionality too. It's called Live Video. But you don't really need to put that in your Keynote presentation. You probably want to use the app like Zoom to do that. So you can use it while you're presenting but also while you're not presenting. 

I want to show you one important setting here that's particular to Zoom, although other apps may have it as well. I'm going to stop Sharing right here and I'm going to Share again. But this time before I completely enter the Sharing Mode, I've selected the window here. I want you to notice these two options here to the right. You've got Share Sound, so if you Keynote presentation includes audio you want to make sure that is checked. Also if your Keynote presentation includes video you want to make sure that's checked. Having these not checked is going to make your presentation look better. It's going to make text and graphics look crisper. But if you're showing video you definitely need to have these checked here so that the stream over Zoom is optimized for playing back that video. Otherwise your video is going to look choppy and not good at all. Also, here you can see some of those options here for including your webcam while you're presenting using Keynote or any other window or entire screen in Zoom. 

One last tip here. When presenting it can be helpful to know a few keyboard shortcuts. It's easy to be reminded of them by using the Shift and the Question Mark key. In other words typing question mark. Then you get this handy list of keyboard shortcuts that you can familiarize yourself with. Note that this is a separate window. So this will also not be seen by other people in the meeting because you're just sharing the main presentation window. So you can keep this handy if you have trouble remembering what the keyboard shortcuts are for doing various things in Keynote. 

Here's something that I think works very well when doing this. At least with the Zoom App check to see how your app handles this. But if I'm sharing this window here and I want to stop sharing of course I can go down and click Stop Sharing in the Zoom App. But also if I simply close the window you could see that it stops sharing. So Zoom recognizes the window no longer exists so it stops sharing automatically. So you don't have to fumble around it to try to stop sharing. You can just close the window and you're done. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.