iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Building the Presentation

With your goal and audience identified and the relative roles of speaker and slideshow clear in your mind, you’re ready to crack Keynote. You’ll find all the details about using Keynote starting in the next chapter; the focus of this section is on the overall process of developing your talk and building the slideshow as you go.

Outline Your Talk

Just as every museum masterpiece starts as a sketch, every jaw-dropping presentation starts as an unadorned outline, a rough pass at capturing the main themes of the talk. At this stage, think in terms of big-picture topics—don’t worry about how to say it or how (or even whether) to picture it in your slides. Just capture as many of your ideas as possible to give yourself the raw material that you’ll transform into your presentation. Start with the high points—one per slide as shown in Figure 11-4—and then gradually fill in bullet points or additional slides to flesh out the details of your talk.

And guess what: It turns out that underneath all its fancy trimmings, a Keynote slideshow is actually an outline in disguise. That’s how your audience experiences it, too. Every slide represents a topic, often with bullet points or other text for subtopics. Groups of slides cluster together naturally to form “chapters” of your talk. As you’ll learn in Chapter 12, Keynote even has an outline view that makes it easy to organize slides by topic (see Outline View for details). While you’re massaging your talk into shape, it’s ...