iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Chapter 11. Planning and Giving Great Presentations

Right from their invention, slideshows have been a mixed blessing. Old-timers will recall painfully long evenings enduring carrousels of family vacation slides, inflicted on unwitting guests by an enthusiastic host. As a kid, you might’ve been subjected to educational filmstrips about igneous rock or isosceles triangles. Slide projectors, filmstrips, overhead transparencies—ever since we figured out how to project images, we’ve used these projections to try to connect with audiences, with uneven results. Since the mid-1990s, those technologies have given way to the computer slideshow, which all too often drown audiences in numbing bullet points and clunky clip art.

It doesn’t have to be that way. On the contrary, well-designed slideshows can bring a presentation to life, helping a speaker engage and educate her audience with stimulating visuals. Keynote can help you do just that.

Keynote is a presentation program for making slideshows, usually to accompany a talk or other live presentation. In fact, the program was originally designed specifically for Apple founder Steve Jobs (Figure 11-1), a design stickler who’s legendary for his entertaining and effective presentations. Like its Microsoft counterpart PowerPoint, Keynote lets you build screens of text and graphics to illustrate important points. Keynote does Microsoft one better, though, with an emphasis on polished visuals and a light, streamlined interface that never gets in ...