Creating eye-catching Keynote presentations

Take advantage of animations, image styles, Magic Move and more

THE REAL POWER OF KEYNOTE LIES IN ITS EASEof use and its ability to produce presentations that look far better than those created in rival applications. To that end, this tutorial concentrates on boosting the visual appeal ofyour presentations, by enhancing images, arranging items, and working with transitions.

As in the other iWork apps, you can give images a distinctive look using the 'Style' tab in the Info menu. Initially, this gives you half a dozen styles that are quite tasteful, emphasising images via subtle drop shadows and well-designed borders. More options are available via the Style Options menu, although most of the examples in the 'Border' tab are a bit over the top.

The Info menu also houses the 'Arrange' tab. This contains important controls for flipping content and moving objects forward or back.

Once you start really getting into the visual side of your presentations, you might hanker for precision placement, and Keynote enables this. Drag any item and you'll see grids and pixel coordinates. If the item is aligned centrally, a yellow guide will temporarily appear. You can also pinch to zoom out or spread your fingers to zoom in.

Ifyou zoom in so much that your slide is bigger than the workspace area, you'll go into full-screen mode, at which point the sidebarand tool barre accessed by tapping relevant screen edges. For further precision, you can zoom any area of a slide to 200 percent.

 Refining effects

To fine-tune pre-defined effects,scroll down in the 'Style' tab, select 'Style Options' and play with the 'Border' and 'Effects' settings.

Effects and borders

Tap an image and select the Info menu. Using the 'Style' tab you can apply all kinds of border effects.

 Slide management

Tap a slide in Keynote's sidebar to see a menu with which you can cut, copy, paste or delete a slide.

 1 Work with duplicates To retain a previous slide's layout, tap it in the sidebar, select 'Copy', then select 'Paste'. To change the image, tap it, select 'Replace...' and choose a new image.

 2 Add transitions To add an animated transition, tap a slide, tap the Animation menu, tap the menu that appears next to the slide and choose a transition to preview it. Tap 'Done' to confirm.

 Magic Move

 If you want to create complex animations between two slides, use Keynote's Magic Move feature. It automatically creates transitions between objects on adjacent slides that are identical. To start, select 'Magic Move...' from the Transitions' popup. If you already have a duplicate slide, tap 'No', otherwise tap 'Yes' to duplicate your slide. All you then need to do is make your changes to the second slide and Keynote does the rest.

 3 Advanced selection To appfy settings to multiple items, select them all by tap-holding one and tapping others. When they're all selected, make your changes via the Info menu.

4 Preview your presentation You can preview your presentation at any point. Tap the 'Play' button to start your presentation; tap or swipe left for the next slide and swipe right for the previous one.