iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Browsing and Organizing Your Slides

Now that you’ve played your rough-draft slideshow in all its full-screen glory, you’ve no doubt discovered that you have some work to do to reveal the stunning presentation hidden within. Keynote offers several display modes to help you get a big-picture view of your slideshow—or more accurately, lots of little-picture views: slide thumbnails that you can select, shuffle, copy, and delete to whip your presentation into shape.

The Slide Navigator

You’ve already met the slide navigator, which draws a visual map of your slideshow at the left of Keynote’s standard document window. This is where Keynote shows you miniature previews of your slides, and you can work directly with these thumbnails to tweak individual screens or make wholesale changes to the entire show. The slide navigator’s appearance varies according to the view you select from the View menu:

• Navigator. In this view, the slide navigator displays a vertical strip of thumbnails, miniaturized but otherwise identical replicas of your slides. This is Keynote’s standard view.

• Outline. The slide navigator changes to a text-only view with the titles and text of all your slides. You can edit the text directly in the slide navigator, a fast way to belt out the initial outline of your text. See Outline View for the rest of the story on outline view.

• Slide Only. Bye-bye, slide navigator. This view excuses the navigator from the table to make more room for the slide canvas.

• Light Table. The slide navigator ...