iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Making Shapes

You can create simple geometric shapes, lines, and arrows in Keynote when you click the Shapes button in the toolbar and choose one from the pop-up menu. You can also insert shapes by choosing Insert and selecting a shape by name from the menu, or by Control-clicking (or right-clicking) the slide canvas, choosing Insert, and picking a shape from the pop-up menu.

Tip

You can draw a shape directly in your document by holding down the Option key when you pick a shape from the Shapes pop-up menu. Let go of the Option key, and your cursor changes to a crosshair shape. Click in the slide canvas where you want one corner of the shape to appear and drag to the opposite corner. Pages draws the shape and displays the shape’s width and height measurements as you drag.

You can adjust these shapes’ borders and fills, giving them colored, gradient, or image fills. And like all other objects, you can adjust their size, opacity, rotation, and so on. Shapes can also hold text—so that they serve as creatively shaped text boxes. Double-click inside a shape and the blinking insertion point appears, ready for you to type or paste in text. Head back to Editing Text in Keynote for a review of text-editing in Keynote.

For the full story on working with shapes, see Adding Shapes.