iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Exporting to Other Formats

Keynote allows you to export your slideshow to a variety of file formats, making your presentation accessible on computers that don’t have Keynote installed—or to heathens who don’t own Macs. You can save your presentation for editing and viewing in PowerPoint or Keynote ’08, or you can export it for browsing as a PDF, a collection of HTML files, a QuickTime movie, or as a thicket of JPEG, PNG, or TIFF image files.

Note

Previous versions of Keynote could save slideshows as Flash, too. This feature was removed in Keynote ’09.

Saving as PowerPoint

The 800-pound gorilla of presentation software is, of course, Microsoft PowerPoint. Keynote can save slideshows in PowerPoint format which people can view and edit on any computer—Mac or Windows—that has PowerPoint. Although PowerPoint uses the same file format on Mac and Windows, these two operating systems handle fonts and graphics in completely different ways, which you’ll surely notice when you view your presentation on a Windows computer.

Equally frustrating are the inconsistencies when you export from Keynote to PowerPoint on the Mac. Many of Keynote’s transitions and builds don’t display properly—or at all—because PowerPoint doesn’t know the corresponding effect. Keynote does the best with what’s available, mapping effects to similar effects when it can; otherwise, transitions are replaced with a standard dissolve. Some bulleted text may disappear, the appearance of fonts and graphics can change, and movies and ...