MacMost: Keynote

You can add a motion effect to a 2D photo without buying expensive software. By using Preview to cut a photo into layers and Keynote to animate them, you can make a photo come to life. This simple parallax animation effect can be used on all sorts of photos to create interesting videos or animated GIFs.

The opening and closing slides of a presentation are often on the screen for a while, so why not make them more interesting than just some text? You can easily add a video as a background to a keynote slide. With iMovie you can create a few different backgrounds that you can reuse.

A new feature of Keynote 9 is the ability to export as an animated GIF file. These are useful to upload to social media or send via text message. The exported GIF includes all transitions, animations and special effects.

You can combine two or more shapes from Apple's huge shape library to create your own unique shapes. You have four methods for combining shapes to add, subtract, exclude or find the union of the shapes. You can then save the shapes for later use.

Many people don't realize that you can use animated GIF images in Keynote presentations without doing anything special. You can just drag and drop them straight from a website or file. You can then set them to loop, start immediately and even trim the animation.

It is easy to put an image in a shape and mask the image using Keynote. But you cannot do the same with video. However, you can place a shape or image on top of a video. So by using the right shape, like the donut shape, editing it, and positioning it just right, you can put video in a circular mask.

SVG images have been around for a while and are widely used on websites and in clipart collections. But you cannot import an SVG file into Pages or Keynote directly, without first converting it using professional software. But since Safari handles SVG images without a problem, and you can export as a PDF from Safari, you can use Safari to convert the image to a format that can then be used inside Pages and Keynote documents.

Instead of using a simple transition from one slide to the next, you can use Magic Move which will animate objects from one position to another between slides. These animations can be more directly controlled by adding slides in the middle of the animation. Items that are added or removed from slides will fade in and out gracefully. These animations can be used in presentations or videos.

You can create professional-looking video end credits with Keynote using only a single simple animation on a single slide. You can incorporate a long list of names, and add shapes, photos or other elements into a group. The result is easily modified and exported as a video to bring into iMovie, Final Cut or any other video editing app.

You can create a photo collage using any number of apps and techniques on your Mac. But the quickest, but still very versatile, method is to use Keynote. You can easily drag and drop images from Photos onto a slide and arrange them with lines, borders, text and other elements. You can then export as an image.

You can animate charts in Keynote, with 2D and 3D charts having different types of animations. With 3D charts, you can rotate the chart, watch it grow, and even have it come in from in front of the screen. You can choose whether to have the entire chart come in at once, or build piece by piece. Once you are done, you can use the animation to punch up your presentation, or export to a video file to use in iMovie or Final Cut.

Keynote allows you to add links to text or elements to link to other slides. You can use this to build a presentation that allows you to jump to different slides while presenting, or use as a simple app that can be controlled by others. You can use some settings in Keynote to allow others to look through a presentation on their own.

Pages, Numbers and Keynote for Mac share a common code base and can support many of the same elements, like text boxes, shapes, images, tables and more. You can copy and paste elements from one into the other. This can be handy when you wish to include tables or charts from Numbers in a presentation of word processing document. Or, when you want to take a slide from Keynote and use it in a spreadsheet or Pages document.

You can build a bullet list slide in Keynote item-by-item, with an animation for each line. You can group lines together and have them animate in succession, or as a single item. You can also have the current item highlight while the previous lines are dimmed.

While Charts are available in Pages, Numbers and Keynote, only Keynote can animate the charts with build-in animations for each element of the chart. You can set the type of animation to fit the style of chart, such as a horizontal wipe for horizontal charts or an iris out for a pie chart. You can group together sets or series and skip the animation of the initial chart background and first set.

If you need to encrypt your documents for security or legal reasons, you can do this easily in Pages, Numbers and Keynotes with the Set Password option. It is important to remember your password or you will lose access to the document. You can also just opt to use File Vault to encrypt all of the data on your Mac.

A new feature in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, is the ability to reduce the size of your file by compressing images, video and trimming the unused parts of videos. These reductions can significantly reduce the file size of image and video-heavy files. You can also save a draft copy that will be even smaller if you need it.

A new feature in Pages, Keynote and also Numbers is the ability to add on-page slideshows called Image Galleries. You an place many images in the same location and have a caption for each. Readers can flip through them using Pages or in iBooks using the ePub format. You can also use them in Keynote to embed image slideshows on a single slide.

The new versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote include the ability to draw freehand with the Apple Pencil, or your finger. You can use a variety of drawing tools when in this mode. The result is an image that can be arranged just like any shape or imported photo.

If you need to rotate video a small amount to correct a camera tilt or create a special effect, you can't do it with iMovie or QuickTime Player. However, you can use Keynote to rotate video. This involves a small Keynote project with just the video, plus a rotation, and then an export. You need to make adjustments to avoid leaving blank corners.