If it is good enough for Al Gore, I guess it should be ok for the rest of us. Yes, Al Gore used Keynote to produce his award-winning slide show, “An Inconvenient Truth”. Keynote is part of the office suite, iWork ’08, which also includes Numbers and Pages. These will be reviewed in a later newsletter.

I must admit I have never used a “presentation” program before as I thought that these were only used by salesmen and educators. I have a friend in Europe who emails me photo slide shows, and it seems that Keynote is the program of choice over there for emailing quantities of photos. You can, for instance, send a slide show of your vacation with about 30 photos for around 1 MB. You can include more explanatory text than with iPhoto Slideshow. Plus you can include music and /or a voice narration. So I was intrigued to see how this worked, and why it was such a popular program for the Europeans.

Upon opening Keynote, you are presented with a choice of templates to use for your presentation. There are over 30 to choose from with coordinating fonts, colors and background texture. Each theme has its own Master pages, ie: title pages, bullet pages, photo pages, etc. These are all very professional looking.
The user interface for the work area is really self-explanatory. Everything you need to use is on the Toolbar. There are icons for Tables, Chart, Text Box, Media, Inspector, etc. If you have used iWeb, iMovie or iDVD, the tool bar icons will be very familiar. There are very good video tutorials. If you haven’t used this type of program before, these are a must before you get started. They can be found under the Help Menu right within the Keynote program. Really though, it is just a question of choosing a theme, writing some text and dragging in photos from iPhoto or movies from iMovie.

Some of the neat features of Keynote are: animated text and Drop Zones, transitions similar to the ones in iMovie, and resizable picture frames. You can also edit photos from within the program, add 3D charts and voice record narration of your slide show. Keynote is compatible with Power Point, PDF, Quicktime, Flash, Photoshop and AppleWorks. Of course, Keynote is fully integrated with iPhoto, iTunes and iMovie.

It is easy to share your presentation. By choosing File and Send To, you can transfer your presentation to iDVD, iMovie and even YouTube. Under Export, you can convert your project into various formats as listed above such as PDF and PowerPoint.

I found this program easy to learn and a lot of fun. I think you will be able to impress all of your friends with high quality presentations. I believe a copy of iWork comes with your Mac, or you can download it at www.apple.com. You can try it for 30 days free of charge. The cost for the complete office suite is $79, a much better deal than Microsoft Office for Mac. I hope you will give it a try.