iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Themes = Templates

If you’ve made your way through the Pages section or peeked ahead at Numbers, you already know that those programs come with a whole arsenal of killer design templates that you can adopt or adapt for your own documents. Keynote does the same but, in a gotta-be-me moment, refers to its templates as themes throughout. Don’t let the vocabulary shift throw you; whatever you choose to call them, themes work exactly the same way as templates in Pages and Numbers.

When you first launch Keynote, the Theme Chooser window greets you with a spread of Keynote’s 44 built-in themes (Figure 12-1). Just like the Template Chooser in the other iWork programs, the Theme Chooser shows miniature previews of the available slide designs. Skim your cursor across the face of any of these thumbnail images to flip through an abbreviated selection of the slide layouts within, as well as previews of the theme’s table and chart styles.

Figure 12-1. The look and feel of your presentation depends on your choice of theme. Apple provides 44 themes with Keynote ’09, and you can also create your own or purchase themes from third-party designers. Choose the size of your slides in the Slide Size pop-up menu, and double-click one of the themes to get started on your slideshow. Change the size of these previews by adjusting the size slider (A), or adjust the size of the overall window by dragging the resize ...