iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Ordering and Automating Builds

As you gradually turn a once-quiet slide into a symphony of elaborate builds, you’ll need to play conductor to keep your animations in organized harmony. The Build Order Drawer is where you compose instructions, coordinating the order and timing of the current slide’s builds with precision. Here you can tell Keynote to play certain builds automatically, wait for your click, or launch several builds at the same time.

Open the Build Order Drawer by clicking the More Options button in any pane of the Build Inspector. Keynote slides out a complete list of every build on the current slide (see Figure 14-12). Every time you add a new build to any object on the slide, Keynote adds it to this master list, which acts as the playlist for your slide’s performance; when you play the slideshow, Keynote steps through the builds in the order shown here. New builds get automatically added to the end of the list. To change a build’s order in this playlist, drag the build to a new location in the Build Order Drawer, or change the number of the build in the Build Inspector’s Order pop-up menu.

Figure 14-12. The Build Order Drawer lists all of a slide’s builds in the order that Keynote will play them during your presentation. This list shows the order, the object name, and the type of build: build in, build out, the smart build effect, or actions like move, rotate, opacity, ...