If you picked up a copy of iWork ’09, you might have noticed the attractive new theme chooser. You might have also noticed that custom themes and third-party themes look pretty bad in it. It’s not unusable, but if you’re as big a perfectionist as I am, the visual disparity can become grating.


Keynote’s new themes have beautiful large preview images, and you can see sample slides from the theme by mousing over the theme images.


Your custom themes will look pixelated in the new theme chooser and will contain no sample slides.

Fortunately, the fix is an easy one.

First, open a new presentation in the theme you want to convert. (For this example, I’m using the 1024x768 variation of Keynote Pro’s Barcelona theme.) Then make seven slides. If you want to follow the same pattern as Apple, they should be:

1. Title - Center (with optional image)
2. Photo - Horizontal
3. Photo - Vertical
4. Title & Bullets
5. Blank with a table
6. Blank with a bar graph
7. Blank with a pie chart

Here are examples of what I’m talking about:





Then choose “Save Theme…” from the file menu. Name it, and you’re done. That’s all there is to it. I was surprised at how simple this process is, but it can be time consuming if you have several third-party or custom themes in Keynote. Remember to back up the themes you are replacing. I’m keeping mine in a folder called Legacy Themes for safe keeping.

There are several new features in iWork ’09, and I hope to get a chance to write about some of the more prominent improvements in the coming days. In the meantime, if you have a Mac, I strongly suggest you go try out the demo. I’m not much for outright product endorsements, but I enjoy being productive with the iWork applications. You might as well.

Tags: keynote, themes