Product Description

Create compelling presentations that get noticed with this amazing graphics tool!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10426 in Software
• Brand: Apple
• Model: m8820z/a
• Platforms: Mac, Mac OS X
• Format: CD-ROM
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .75 pounds

Features

• Design razor-sharp text, beautiful charts & tables, and professional-quality layouts, all with just a few clicks
• Create high-quality visual effects like transitions between slides, element effects and more
• Intuitive slide navigator and simple thumbnail viewer for more precise controls and better slide organization
• Professional themes and images combined with must-haves like anti-aliased text, dynamic alignment guides and snap-rulers
• Experiment with different typefaces to create the perfect text for your presentation

Amazon.com
Keynote, Apple’s answer to Microsoft’s PowerPoint presentation software, has the limited feature set of a first offering but makes a good-looking show out of the gate.

Users accustomed to PowerPoint’s robust array of clip art, pre-populated themes, and pre-set transitions will be disappointed with Keynote’s small offering of pre-fabricated elements. However, they won’t be able to find fault with the visual quality of the elements that Keynote does include; any of the tasteful Keynote themes, detachable chart elements, or cinematic slide transitions would easily stand out against their PowerPoint counterparts.

Keynote’s interface is fairly similar to PowerPoint, although there are some differences. As with PowerPoint you can setup and see the progress of your slide show in a vertical panel on the left. Most of the formatting controls are in a control box called the "inspector"--whether building a chart, making a graphic twirl, or mandating the transition between two slides, you are mostly using the inspectors’ controls rather than dropdown menus or key commands to get things done. In addition to being able to animate imported graphics, audio and movie files can be played within a slide, though these multimedia effects will not run across multiple slides.

What will have to wait for the next version are comprehensive chart creation and exporting capabilities. Currently Keynote provides nine beautiful chart styles to choose from, but getting data into these pre-populated formats can be tedious. Users may find it easier to construct their more complicated charts outside the program, and import them as pre-made images into the slideshow. And, though you can export Keynote presentations to QuickTime and to PowerPoint, there is no Keynote-to-HTML conversion as yet. --Elizabeth Aoki

From the Manufacturer
Keynote makes it a snap to create cinema-quality presentations with professional-caliber themes, razor-sharp text, and beautiful charts and tables. Make layered images with transparent graphics and text, and adjust the transparency of each layer as you choose. Move from one slide to the next with 3D transitions. Control the pace of your presentation with stunning animations. And do it all with unparalleled ease of use.

Organization and precision controls

An intuitive slide Navigator lets you keep your entire presentation--however large--right at your fingertips. This thumbnail view of all your slides helps you decide the flow of your presentation. The Inspector lets you maintain control over visual elements like text, graphics, tables, charts, and transitions with dynamic alignment guides and rulers that ensure your slide elements are perfectly placed.

New ways to persuade

Keynote gives you a number of advantages right out of the box, including professionally designed themes and images. Plus Keynote provides must-have features including fully anti-aliased text that looks good at any size, dynamic alignment guides, and rulers that make it a snap to place text and graphics exactly where you want them. You also get a Slide Canvas that’s fully anti-aliased, letting you move, resize, rotate, and layer elements to your heart’s desire--with pinpoint accuracy.

Themes

Keynote makes it easy to develop show-stopping presentations with a consistent look and feel across all slides. Themes are templates with coordinated color, fonts, textures, and other properties. You can just choose an Apple-designed theme and begin. Feel like creating a distinctly different look for a presentation? Go ahead and modify Keynote themes, then save them as your own custom versions or share with others.

Pro-quality graphics: text

You can experiment with different typefaces and styles until you find the one that’s perfect for your presentation. Mac OS X includes over $10,000 worth of high-quality fonts licensed from designers and type foundries around the world, and you can use them all--and even add drop shadows, opacity, and other neat effects to them--with Keynote. The Quartz rendering engine displays these fonts with astonishing sharpness at any size, so your slides are readable all the way in the back of the auditorium.

Pro-quality graphics: resizing

Thanks to Quartz, resizing graphics is as easy as selecting the graphic and dragging its bounding box as large or small as you need. The results are achieved in real-time, so you can instantly get the results you want.

Pro-quality graphics: rotation

Rotation is also a matter of click and drag. Select the image or text, and choose your degree of rotation in the Graphic Inspector. If you prefer, you can achieve the exact angle of your graphic by holding down the Command-key and dragging the image.

Pro-quality graphics: alpha-channel composite

Achieve impressive results by including images with alpha-channel masks, such as multilayered Adobe Photoshop files, to create rich visual images. Also, you can adjust opacity in the Inspector window to add transparency to text and images.

Smooth transitions

Move from one idea to the next smoothly and seamlessly with 2D transitions, or really wow your audience with 3D transitions. Naturally, the software gives you a palette of transitions to choose from.

Next-generation graphics

Your audience will appreciate Keynote’s eye-popping graphics, made possible by leveraging a number of cutting-edge technologies in Mac OS X--including hardware-accelerated Quartz, OpenGL, Aqua, and QuickTime.

Present with confidence

With support for dual monitors, Keynote can simultaneously show your presentation on a projector and display speaker’s notes on your PowerBook, so you can view notes for each slide during the course of your presentation.

Customer Reviews

A good version 1.0. But still version 1.0
I like Keynote. It makes it blissfully easy to do the majority of the things that presenters do -- in particular, create pie charts, bar charts, and other pretty-but-readable stuff. If you want to create good looking charts or presentations in a hurry, Keynote will almost certainly serve your needs.

Plus, it's easy to pick up. My learning curve _might_ have been five minutes. (Though, to be fair, I've reviewed hundreds of software applications for computer magazines, and I'm a fast learner. So give yourself ten minutes, instead, before you pick up the adequate but not-overwhelming printed manual.)

Keynote is a good example of technology helping rather than getting in the way. Except you'll probably spend more than a couple of minutes playing with the really impressive set of slide transitions. I never need such things, but I had fun with them anyway.

But don't expect perfection. Keynote is a great version 1.0, but it's definitely 1.0. So far, I've found two glaring omissions: it doesn't export presentations to HTML (PDF, Quicktime and PowerPoint yes... HTML no). And there's no way to create a follow-me arrow, as in Visio. Creating a process chart, with this-leads-to-that, or an organization chart, can be an exercise in frustration.

I'm sure that later versions will address these limitations, however. Overall, I'm very pleased with the software.

Great 1.0 version!
I am in sales and needless to say I use Powerpoint often. The learning curve is short and you could churn out professional looking presentations in no time. However, it is a version 1.0 and it needs some growing up to do.

You can't export to HTML but you can export to Quicktime, PDF, and Powerpoint. When you do export to Powerpoint you can not have all the bells and whistles that you may have loaded your presentation with. Keynote has different transitions and fonts than Powerpoint so those get lost when you export. My first trial presentation I loaded it with all the effects possible (transitions, shadows, animations, etc.) and exported to all the possible formats. It was very easy to do but none of the other formats looked as good as the original Keynote presentation. The Powerpoint presentation did come close but the graphics compared to Keynote just did not stand up. I did have to make some adjustments in Keynote to make the Powerpoint version better (took out the shadows). When you make a movie you decide just how big you want it to be for the purpose of sending it via e-mail or posting it on the Internet. It was also incredibly easy making a PDF file.

Where it does come strong is in graphics. The slides look beautiful and so does the text and the pie charts and graphs. The transitions are a lot of fun and mostly because they are new and haven't really been seen before. The program is very intuitive and easy to use. I look forward to the additional features that will surely come down the road.

It knows what you need.
For years, PowerPoint has been the bain of my existence. My boss is obsessed with it. Every week it's another presentation in PowerPoint. Finally, an alternative. As usual, Apple takes the "point" out of a Microsoft product. It seems fair, all things considered.

The user interface for this program is fast and easy to learn. It even gives you several options of themes to use for those deadline crunches that we all run into from time to time. It includes the famous drag-and-drop functionality that we've come to expect.

Most importantly, you can save it out to PowerPoint for those less enlighted souls who still think that a Windows machine will help them keep up with the times.