Alyssa Goodman's "Desk"

Keynote: Presentation Software for the Aesthetically-Inclined

When Keynote first came out in 2003, I was a PowerPoint guru.  Being a bit of a Mac person, though, I was willing and excited to try Keynote in its early days…BUT I was disappointed with its extremely lacking feature set in comparison to PowerPoint.  Today, though, my allegiances have changed completely!  I am a Keynote guru now—I fully admit to spending way too much time on my presentations to make them “just right,” but the options now offered by Keynote to perfectionist/aesthetically-obsessed people like me are irresistible.   The iPad version is pretty cool too, but it’s still a bit limited for my ~300MB/presentation style!

Some favorite features: 1) Moving images are handled better in Keynote than any other presentation software I’ve ever seen… you can overlay a movie on a still image & make it transparent!  That’s very important to those of us who compare “3D” images as slices with 2D images as backgrounds.  You can also control movies frame-by-frame with a slider within a presentation in order to make your point. 2) iWork.com.  This is a little-known service of Apple that allows users of the iWork suite of applications to share their work at a web site called iWork.com.  Keynote presentations uploaded to iWork.com can be not only shared/commented upon with others, they can also be viewed—with ALL the animations working(!)—in a full-screen browser mode to look exactly like the original presentation.  [Here is a sample ..make sure to click the “play” button.] The BAD part is that storage space on iWork.com is currently not expandable, and is very limited.  Perhaps this “beta” service will finally expand with the advent of iCloud? 3) Import/Export to PowerPoint is very good, and improving all the time—so you can collaborate with PPT users, cross-platform. 4) Image-editing (e.g. instant alpha for background removal in images; transparency control; masking with shapes) is so good in Keynote that I frequently use it for manipulating images beyond those to appear in presentations.  It’s simpler to use than Photoshop and Illustrator, and much cheaper.

• Software site link: http://www.apple.com/iwork/keynote/
• Price: Not free, but both Mac OS and iPad versions are inexpensive.
• Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynote_(presentation_software)