Russ Aaronson March 11, 2003

Making Great Presentations: Part One – The Hook

“I doubt what they’ve done is as rich as PowerPoint”
Bill Gates remarking on the release of Apple’s Keynote presentation software,
Thursday, January 9th, 2003.

Now, using my miraculous Bill Gates Doublespeak Detector (patent pending, source code unavailable, fair-use-doctrine-violating-software license still being developed by a team of lawyers), I offer you the true meaning behind Mr. Gates’ comment:

I doubt what (those meddling kids)’ve done is as (capable of making anyone, especially Me) rich as (the Mac application that’s better than the Windows version [but ninety-six percent of the computing public will never know because even the United States Government approves of my monopoly] of) PowerPoint ( [stifled yawn] oh boy, even I get sleepy when I hear the name of the application that has created more boring presentations than Ben Stein did in that Ferris Bueller movie).

Thus, before I even begin this review, I should point out that there is nothing that even the mighty Steve himself can do that will make you a more interesting presenter. If you’re one of those people who rank “fear of public speaking” higher than “fear of death” in those yearly surveys you hear about on the evening news, save your presentation software money and enroll in a Toastmasters class. It may not bring you fame and fortune (my parents enrolled me in TM in the third grade and I’m pulling in a public teacher’s salary), but you may get invited to more parties, and you get to keep all five M&M’s they give you for making no vocalized pauses in a one-minute speech, um (Dang! Now I’m down to four!).

Making Great Presentations: Part Two – The Overview

Quite simply, Keynote is Apple’s new presentation software package. Though the program looks and feels quite new, it really follows the same presentation paradigm established by PowerPoint so many years ago. First you choose (or create) a theme for your slide show, then you build it using text, graphics, sound, and video as you see fit (provided your trusty computer can handle the load). With your Mac hooked up to a TV or projector you can thrill audiences with your masterwork in person, or you can save it in some self-presenting format for streaming or downloading across networks or the Web.

Again, nothing groundbreaking here. But with Keynote, you’ll discover that you can do almost everything you did in PowerPoint with less effort, better results, and a cheaper price tag.

Making Great Presentations: Part Three – The Basics

Open the Keynote box and you’ll find an installation CD, a User’s Guide (which, at 97 pages, is well worth the price of admission), a Quick Reference card detailing how to use the Slide Inspector (more on this later) and about a kajillion keystroke shortcuts, a registration card (Wanna have fun and void your support at the same time? Use the included stickers to send your card to China, or Macao, or even Canada!), and the Proof-of-Purchase Coupons (which Apple reserves the right to render completely and utterly useless at any time).

Installation’s breezy, and when you open up Keynote you’ll get a blank presentation and your choice of themes.

Here’s where you’ll probably have the same “A-ha!” moment that so many users have already experienced. You’ll see the selection window slide right out from under the title bar. You’ll see just how professional these themes look compared to most of the choices in PowerPoint. Oh, and you’ll keep looking for a scroll bar to click, because there’s only twelve to choose from. That’s right ladies and gentlemen, you’re finally using a business application for the Mac that’s as smooth and elegant as those wacky iApps you’ve grown to love so much.

Once you choose your theme, you have a minimalist interface that’s powerful without getting in your way. Dropdown menus in the Button Bar allow you to access essential functions, while the Slide Inspector handles just about any degree of customization you could imagine. You can insert elements into your slides by invoking the choose command from the edit menu, by using the appropriate keyboard shortcut, or even with a simple drag and drop from anywhere else. Anyone who has used PowerPoint will surely appreciate the ability to just drag elements into the presentation, but those same users will likely become disgusted with the arcane “Edit-Place-Choose” technique for such an essential feature. A button for this procedure shouldn’t be too much to ask.

As I said before, the Slide Inspector is the real star here. One click and you’re altering the opacity of a graphic; another click and you can set playback parameters for a QuickTime movie. The Build window in the Inspector is especially nice, as it allows you to preview, add, and manipulate transitions within and between slides.

Inexplicably, the ability to select a font family, typeface, and size has been placed in a separate window, even though type color, alignment, and numbering lives with the Inspector. The Apple folks should seriously consider merging the two on the next go-round. Keynote also provides a separate window for color management, but the tools available here are so robust that they would likely crowd the Inspector. All in all, the Inspector makes it easier to find the features you need, and it drastically reduces the button bar clutter that’s all the rage in Redmond.

The Slide Organizer window on the left is essentially the same thing you’ll find in PowerPoint, but Keynote is simply more flexible. You can manually indent slides to visually organize them in outline form, and clicking a disclosure triangle can reveal or hide grouped slides for easier navigation. You can easily switch to a text view in this window, just as in PowerPoint, but simply pulling the toolbar down to one of the text lines causes the slide to appear in the main window. Should it suit your fancy, you can even elect to devote some of the space here to scrollable list of master slides, all available in a scroll-and-click. As I said before, there’s nothing terribly new here (Microsoft introduced a similar idea with the Formatting Palatte) – it’s just easier to do the things you did in PowerPoint.

Perhaps my greatest gripe with the interface is that there’s simply no easy way to insert Keynote’s beautiful clip art. After going to the File menu and choosing “Open Image Library” you’ll get a Finder window with five labeled folder icons. Choosing one leads to a “Processing” status bar, and then a new Keynote window with thumbnails of the clip art streaming down the Slide Organizer Window. The process is clunky, and it creates window clutter. This is definitely an area that Apple should focus on for the first revision.

Making Great Presentations: Part Four – The Goodies

Ok, so you’ve heard enough about the nuts and bolts. So how good does this stuff look?

In a word – elegant. The included themes are interesting without being abrasive. The clip art is fully scalable (thanks, Quartz!) and professional.

But transitions are where Keynote truly shines. If you haven’t seen the cube or mosaic slide transitions, go to Apple’s website and download the QuickTime sample file. Even the individual element transitions will astound, with twirls and pivots that impress without being showy. I know I’m starting to sound like a pretentious wine buff here, but anyone who’s logged hours making a presentation before knows what how much effort it takes to make a PowerPoint dynamic without becoming complete cheese. When you’re working in Keynote, it feels as if the folks at Apple started with more graphics, themes, and transitions, then took away all of the ones that disturbed more than one in ten people watching the show.

This is where we get to one serious complaint about Keynote: quantity. PowerPoint has 60 themes and 24 templates, compared to Keynote’s dozen for each. There’s only a fraction of PowerPoint’s clip art in Keynote, and no prefab, click and show templates as in PowerPoint. Surely, this is what Gates was referring to when he mentioned how “rich” PowerPoint has become. For my money, I’d rather have twelve good themes than pan for a golden one in a river of graphic sludge, but your mileage may vary. If you do happen to already own PowerPoint, you can always use those themes in your Keynote presentation. Then again, you probably have better taste than to commit such heresy – after all, you are using a Mac, right?

One should also note that Keynote contains absolutely no sound effects. This is the point in the program where I point out that for the last three years I’ve worked with several classes of high school students, teaching them how to use PowerPoint for their artist presentations in Humanities class. In those three years, I have never told students how to add sound effects to their work; nevertheless, the moment when a few groups “discover” these little gems is the same moment a teacher begins contemplating new employment. You spend a week watching PPT’s on Vermeer and Van Gogh laden with screeching tires, laser bolts, and typewriter clatter, and then come tell me how much you miss this feature in Keynote. Don’t worry, I won’t keep the coffee warm waiting for you to show up.

Clearly, Apple’s going for quality against Microsoft’s quantity, and I think it was a good call. Once you’ve put together a complete Keynote presentation you’ll see what I mean.

Making Great Presentations: Part Five – The Details

When you’re the company with less market share than RC Cola, you know that you have to give people a good reason for choosing your brand. In the computer business, this means compatibility. Nobody understands this fact better than Apple, and no Apple app demonstrates this need better than Keynote.

Keynote has drawn a great deal of attention simply because it saves presentations in XML format (actually, it’s an XML schema dubbed APXL, but most users probably won’t care). For those readers whose grasp of document and internet standards even lags behind mine, XML is a powerful, cross platform software and hardware independent tool for transmitting information. The average user should benefit from XML as Keynote matures and experiences the same kind of tight integration we’ve recently witnessed as the iApps became united in the iLife package.

Until that time, Keynote allows you to save your masterwork as an XML file, a PPT (PowerPoint) file, a PDF, or even a QuickTime movie. Of the four, I was most impressed with the QuickTime file compatibility, which saves your presentation in a compact, easily transported file that retains all of the beauty and functionality of the original. Streaming or distributing your presentation on the Internet is a snap with QT, and the ability to play your work on any computer with a QT player means that you’ll rarely be stuck with a computer that can’t open your file.

Of course, most Wintel machines, and many Macs as well already have a copy of PowerPoint installed, so you could also just save your Keynote as PPT and hit the road. If you’re like me, you’ll want proof of this feature before you blindly trust your next critical presentation on this feature. I tested the conversion with a few of my best PPT’s, including one containing a bizarre font, some tricky formatting, and a variety of picture formats. Surprisingly, the conversions were almost flawless. In the most complex presentation (which contained over forty slides), only three exhibited flaws in Keynote. Ten minutes of adjustments had me up and running again; admittedly, not perfect, but admirable for such a complex task. My advice is to save your work as a PPT and a QT movie if you’re planning to take your show on the road.

On a related note, the process of fixing my PPT in Keynote revealed a wonderful feature that Microsoft’s juggernaut lacks. When you click and hold on a slide element to place it on the page, a small window appears detailing the element’s exact coordinates on the screen. This might seem trivial, but the real magic happens when Keynote draws bright yellow horizontal and vertical lines if the element is perfectly centered on the slide.

I was so impressed with this feature that I went back and played with most of the slides in my presentation, tugging around elements in an attempt to get the yellow crosshairs to appear. To my surprise, many of the text elements in my slides were actually a bit off-center, even though I’d spent the equivalent of several Simpsons reruns working to get everything just so. This is yet another example of how Keynote makes PowerPoint look positively crass.

Speaking of crass, you can also learn some valuable lessons by translating a Keynote presentation into PowerPoint. In my experience, the process was a bit poky, but error free. Then you hit the “View Show” button, and you quickly discover that PowerPoint makes your Keynote look like a piece of puke. Those smooth, Quartz transitions become slow and blocky (that is, if PowerPoint even tries to replicate them – which it often doesn’t). Graphics get warped, and drop shadows look too pixilated to be of any practical use. I’m impressed that the translation actually worked, but you’d be wise to go with the QT movie instead (or, if transitions aren’t critical for you, PDF format).

On a final note, you should know that Keynote does not allow you to link to a live web page from within a presentation. Some folks will find this situation unacceptable, but I’m not a big fan of such moves. You never know where you’ll be presenting, and it’s often hard enough to make sure that your presentation hardware is working fine, let alone worrying about reliable internet connections as well. I also dislike sitting in an audience and watching websites load, unless I’m in the market for a good public nap. Either way, the fact that Keynote files are created in web-friendly XML suggests that support for this feature should be forthcoming.

Making Great Presentations: Part Six – The Conclusion

When I reviewed PowerPoint v.X last summer, I was quite impressed with the addition of transparencies and QuickTime transitions; but in the time since that review, I have yet to use either feature. Either they’re buried too deeply into the menus, or the results look too gimmicky. After just a few hours with Keynote, I found myself deftly manipulating object fills and opacity, and the product was worth keeping. Whereas PowerPoint always left me feeling that I could have done better, playing my first Keynote was a satisfying experience.

And that’s when I think I got it. Even if you don’t buy Keynote (heck, you probably either have AppleWorks or Office already, and there’s plenty of shareware in the presentation category as well), Apple has done something remarkably clever. Developers will finally be able to see an application, written from the ground up with Jaguar in mind, that uses Quartz and Aqua to take something banal (remember, this is presentation software) and make it pleasant again. In other words, Keynote is the best advertising that OS X has ever had.

So, should you buy it? Let’s do the numbers…

1. If you’re a teacher or purchasing for an educational institution, you can get Keynote, and iLife, for just fifteen bucks (if you act before the end of March). My point for anyone out there eligible for this deal – what are you waiting for?
2. If you do presentations in your job, just pay the fee and get working. If nothing else, your clients will be happy just to be rid of the same old PowerPoint themes and clip art.
3. If you need to make your own presentation themes for an organization, Keynote will help you do a faster job with less work.
4. If you don’t own PowerPoint, you’ll save a few hundred bucks with Keynote.

That leaves very few people who wouldn’t benefit from Keynote, but that’s my point. Apple still needs to tighten up the interface, and more themes and clip art would really make this baby fly off the shelves. The 10.2.4 upgrade solved some display problems on Titanium PowerBooks, and the entire application now seems more responsive and error free. Unless you just don’t need to spend a hundred bucks on another presentation application, or if you have absolutely no need for presentation software at all, don’t bother waiting for a more mature version of Keynote to come along.

After all, even if you can’t possibly be any more interesting, your presentations always could be.

Product	Keynote
Company	Apple
MSRP	$99 ($15 for Educators and Educational institutions, including iLife, until 3/15/03)
Hits	Elegant designs, intuitive interface, saves in QT, PDF, and PPT formats.
Misses	Could use a better selection of clip art and themes. Some awkward menu groupings.
Rating	(5 possible)
Requirements	G3 or G4, OS 10.2 or later, 128 MB RAM (512 recommended), 8MB of VRAM (32MB recommended), 1GB of available disk space.

Russ Aaronson

English Teacher,Pompano Beach, FL