Presenting Keynote

By Michael Vallance
Mac Users Group Singapore
www.macuser.org.sg

Overview
Keynote is Apple’s new presentation software designed to captivate and mesmerize. With Apple-designed themes, amazing typography, cinematic quality animations, alignment guides, and PowerPoint, QuickTime and PDF compatibility, Keynote will become the choice of professionals. It radiates power. Anything else will simply bore.

Features
Keynote includes professionally designed finance, education and fun themes, spectacular transitions and a library of more than 100 high-quality graphics. There are alignment guides for the tables, charts, graphics, text, etc. providing dynamic feedback to ensure all the elements on each slide are precisely positioned.
The gorgeous graphics give Keynote an aura of professionalism. Alpha channels can be used to create transparency around irregular shaped images. Crisp graphics can be over-layed and opacity fully adjusted.
Charts are crucial to any presentation. Keynote offers eight of the most commonly used chart types with the colours, textures and fonts complementing the background and tone of the chosen theme. Excel data can also be pasted into Keynote’s Chart Inspector and edited.


Performance
Creating your first presentation is simple. Keynote offers a number of master slides in a pane. Additional slides can then be added and indented so that you concentrate on one sub-topic of your presentation at a time.
To leverage existing content Keynote can import PowerPoint files.
To share your Keynote presentations with Windows users, simply export as a PDF or PowerPoint file. However, some of the transitions may not work. It is therefore recommended that you export your Keynote presentation as a QuickTime movie, as not only will all those cool transitions be assured but also your content cannot be ripped off by the unscrupulous.

Reviewer’s comments
Apple CEO Steve Jobs is renowned for his compelling presentations. If you too wish to design persuasive presentations then buy Keynote now (http://www.asia.apple.com/keynote).

System requirements
Mac OSX v10.2
128 MB RAM
8 MB of video memory
Price: $179 ex GST

Michael Vallance is from the Mac Users Group of Singapore. Its website is at www.macuser.org.sg