Keynote Tips and Tricks

Here’s a short list I recently made for some folks who were new to Keynote. Maybe this is useful to other people who live in Keynote as much as I do every day.

1. Use multiple Inspectors. Option-Click any of the tiles at the top of the Inspector palette to create a new Inspector window. You can do this as many times as you like and set each window to a different tile.

2. If you have an animation heavy first slide, create a simple “appear” build for a Keynote-drawn square “off slide” and make it the first build after the slide transition so your real animation plays smoothly when you trigger it next.

3. When you’re presenting on two monitors and you forget the keyboard commands press the “/” key to bring up a Presenter View only list of the commands:

4. Play audio files when you want to by giving them a “Start Audio” build in the Build Inspector:

5. Watching the iWork ’08 Tour movie is nice, but looking at how they built it is more helpful. Navigate to /Library/Application Support/iWork ’08/iWork and then right click on that .app file and choose Show Package Contents. Then navigate further to: /Contents/Resources/English.lproj/iWork Tour.key. This can be opened in Keynote just like your own files. Take a look at the builds on each slide and learn. If you come across some artwork that you’d like to get for yourself, right click on that keynote file in the Finder and Show Package Contents again. Now you can dig through the file for the source art they used.