iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Working with Objects

As described earlier, Keynote, Pages, and Numbers share much more than the box they ship in and the iWork installation disc. They share a common collection of objects—the pictures, charts, tables, shapes, text boxes, movies, and sounds that combine to create a designed document. Designing a Keynote slideshow is very much like designing a page-layout document in Pages. Both programs give you a canvas on which you organize and layer individual design elements—the objects—to create the finished composition.

A fundamental difference in Keynote, however, is that there’s no such thing as an inline object (as there is in Pages). All objects in Keynote are effectively floating objects whose locations are independent of every other object on the slide. You can’t nest a shape inside a text box, for example, or a picture inside a shape, like you might do in Pages. Every element of your slide floats free of the rest. (If you’re curious, see Floating vs. Inline Objects for a review of how inline and floating objects work in Pages.)

Apart from that, objects in Keynote follow essentially the same laws of document physics as Pages objects. The rest of this chapter reviews how to work with those objects. Before getting into the specifics of each object type, though, here’s a quick review of what they all have in common—how to select, move, and manipulate objects on a Keynote slide.

Selecting Objects

Every object on the page is contained in its own invisible box, and you have to ...