Keynote: great looks, less work

Blogging has been slow this week because we've been working intently with one of our clients on a high-level presentation. While this was a rather intense project -- it's for a very senior executive in front of a very critical forum -- I was pleased to be doing the work in Keynote rather than PowerPoint. The results look amazing, as they always do in Keynote.

With that said, I did find a couple challenges that I had to overcome in my presentation development in Keynote. These included:

1. Finding a way to build multi-part stacked area graphs a few steps at a time. Much of our work was building an area graph showing growth in multiple areas over time. To step the audience through the graph, we'd build each layer left to right. While Keynote can animate each layer, it doesn't have any way to have a layer build half-way across the graph and then stop. We ended up using a rectangle that matched the background color to mask off portions of the graph, but when we had a complicated gradient background to the graph, this approach become nearly, but not quite, unmanageable.


2. Having elements color shift from machine to machine. We rented a MacBook Pro for my PC-centric client to use, while I developed much of the content on my own Powerbook G4. Much to my surprise, the colors of objects like the masking rectangles noted above would change between machines. This is despite my calibrating both displays; the object colors were actually different on the two machines. Backgrounds transferred fine -- only the created objects would color shift. I still haven't figured how why this happens.

But at the end of the day, the advantages of using Keynote vastly outweighed these challenges. The little touches that really made the presentation pop were:

• Textured graphs. Having textures mapped to the area charts just made them feel so much more real than any ordinary color or gradient would have. And the subtle shadows used by default in the area graphs gave them depth that you just don't see in PowerPoint graphs.


• Video quality transitions. We use transitions as a visual vocabulary for segmenting the presentation. We used 3d cube effects for moving between major sections, while minor transitions were just simple wipes and dissolves. Keynote's transitions look fabulous, even on a 40-foot screen, and as a result, the audience gets the sense they are watching something more akin to a movie than a slide show.


• No surprises. When I build slides in PowerPoint, I always feel like I'm having to fight the software to get anything done. Worse, every now and again, PowerPoint will just die trying to import a big graphic or saving your 50 Mbyte presentation. Keynote, on the other hand, seems to just work. Ask it to import a 20 Mbyte photo, and it will think for a bit, and there it is. At one point, our Keynote file was more than 100 MBytes, yet Keynote was just purring along, saying, "Yeah, I can do that -- give me a sec." And we never had a single crash or any kind. When working by the hour on a hard deadline, that's worth its weight in gold -- literally.

Oh, one other nice touch. We had to pull in Word scripts and PowerPoint templates from other sources during the project, and both Pages and Keynote happily read those documents without a hitch. And when the time came to print out all the materials, we just dumped them to PDF files that we put on thumb drives and printed on local printers. All in all, a great experience.

The client gives their presentation on Monday, and I'll be interested to see the audience reaction to this Keynote presentation among a sea of PowerPoint slides. The group we've been working with has been swearing they will just get a MacBook for presentations one of these days, despite the protestations of their IT group. A good reaction on Monday may just push them over the edge. I hope it does -- like Keynote and MacBooks, it will make my job easier and them look better.

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