MacMost: Keynote

Animation in Keynote can be as easy as duplicating a slide and making changes to create a start point and end point. Many professional animations in presentations just use this simple technique.

Instead of using the limited title options in iMovie, you can build almost anything you want in Keynote as a presentation. Use text, transitions, builds and animations to make your title sequence. Then export as a video to use in iMovie over a background.

A new feature in Keynote lets you easily place an animated dynamic background behind your slides. You can customize them with your own colors, sizes and movement.

You can animate charts in Keynote, showing how data changes over time. If you use animated Bubble Charts in the right way, you can end up with some interesting results.

You can use a Chart to build a dynamic horizonal or vertical timeline in Pages. You can then easily adjust or add values to the timeline. This works for Keynote too.

Apple provides a wide variety of shapes in Pages, Numbers and Keynote. You can go way beyond just filling them with a solid color. You can edit the lines of a shape, combine shapes, use gradient fills, creative borders, shadows and much more.

Instead of using an arrow or circle to point out an item in a photo, use shapes to mask out the rest of the image, or create an image mask from a shape for even more options. Different techniques can be animated in different ways.

You can use either Pages or Keynote to build a photo collage. Pages is better suited to printing and exporting PDFs. Keynote is best for creating collages to be shared online or viewed on your screen. Both apps have the same tools so building a collage is similar in either app.

A new feature in Keynote 11.2 is the ability to show a live video feed on your slides. You can use this to show yourself or something you are demonstrating on your presentation screen. You can also show an iPhone or iPad and when you record your presentation the video is included and ready for export.

Keynote presentations don't have to be linear. You can use links to jump to any slide. With these links you can turn a Keynote presentation into a simple interactive quiz. This can be used in classroom or marketing situations.

By default each photo placed on a Keynote slide will transition in one at a time. But you can have those builds overlap so the items appear at the same time or as each is moving. This can make slideshows look more modern and professional.

There is a special Reading Mode in Pages, Numbers and Keynote on the iPhone and iPad that allow you to view your documents without accidentally making changes. Pages also include a Presenter Mode for using your iPad as a teleprompter.

While iMovie's title options are limited, you can create almost any sort of text caption with animation in Keynote and then easily apply it to your iMovie project.

You can create a cinematic text reveal using just Keynote and iMovie on your Mac. By using a shape mask in Keynote, you can place some parts of an image on top of your text and other parts behind it. You can also mask titles with a green screen to then use in iMovie on top of actual video footage.

By using more than one text formatting or styling technique at a time, you can create title text that stands out more than just making the text large and bold. Here are 10 ideas for styling text that you can use in Pages and Keynote.

The shapes in Pages, Numbers and Keynote can be used to spruce up a document or presentation. You can do much more with them besides a simple color fill and border.

You can use the free Apple Keynote app to make custom icons for your iPhone's Home Screen. You can use the shapes in Keynote and style them, or draw your own. Then use Shortcuts to place the icons on your Home Screen.

A new feature of Keynote is the ability to embed a YouTube or Vimeo video right into a slide in your presentation. Then you can show the video without having to switch to a web browser.

You can use Keynote on your Mac to create digital flash cards to study or quiz others. Each slide can contain the question and answer, but you can use builds to have only the question shown at first. You can shuffle these cards manually and also print them.

If you need a clock or countdown timer in your iMovie video, you can create one in Keynote and export it to use in iMovie. You can manually create each second as a slide, or use this simple script to add all of the slides automatically. In iMovie you can adjust the size, color and even reverse the overlay to count down or up.