Created by the folks from growingleaders.com we present to you:

Every Presentation Ever: Communication FAIL

Click here to view Mac 101: Using Keynote as Motion in a bind

This brings up a tip that wasn’t posted in the TUAW article…exporting Keynote animations with an alpha channel (transparency).

The basic steps are:

1. Set all your slides to a background of NONE on the Slide Inspector-Appearance tab. The slides will look white, but Keynote knows they’ve been set to NONE.
2. Choose Export from the File Menu
3. Click the Quicktime icon in the export panel
4. Check the User Transparency option
5. In the format drop-menu choose Custom
6. Set your desired video size and click the Settings… button
7. For Compression type, choose either Animation or PNG (these are the only codecs that support transparency at the moment)
8. Set the frame rate high (like 30 or 60 fps), or set it to match your video editing frame rate (you may want to try it both ways to see which works best)
9. Set the Key frames to All – this will make sure none of the animations get mangled during export (this is a good trick even if you’re not using transparency)
10. IMPORTANT! Set the Depth to Millions of Colors+. It’s that + that makes sure the transparency gets exported. If you miss this step you won’t get a transparent video.
11. Slide the Quality to Best
12. Click Okay
13. Choose your Audio settings
14. Click Next
15. Name and save your movie

You should now have a movie with an embedded alpha channel that works in most video apps (such as Motion or Final Cut Pro). This trick has all kinds of great uses, and we thought it would be good to add to the TUAW post since it’s likely someone is going to ask about it (since Motion can export transparency easily).

have fun!

We’ve broken the page into sections, so you can easily find Themes, Wireframing toolkits, support, tutorials, and other odds and ends. We’d suggest visiting each site and viewing all the demo movies and samples they post. The prices vary, but even the most expensive themes are a great deal (especially compared to some PowerPoint template prices!). Some themes (like ours for instance) come with extras and sample files which you can use to spice up your own files.

Also, don’t be afraid of buying a theme that doesn’t quite fit the bill and modifying it to your needs. Our themes are built with flexibility in mind, and most of the other companies do the same. You can also contact the theme maker and ask for help. Usually they will give you tips or even modify a template (within reason) for you. Some of them also offer full custom services (at custom prices of course). This can be anything from adding your logo to a commercial theme, to a full, one of a kind, custom design.

So, support these small businesses (and the Keynote community on the whole) buy visiting the theme makers and resources on our Resources page, and tell them you heard about them from Keynote.com.

Click here to visit our Resources page.

Oh, if you know of a site that we haven’t listed, feel free to use our contact form and send us a link. We’ll try to post it right away.

Keynote 08 and 09 have special “Chart Colors” palette than can only be opened from the Chart Inspector. If you drop a chart on your slide, then visit the Chart Inspector, you’ll see a “Chart Colors” button. This opens a new little color/texture selector that includes 3d textures, 2d image and 2d color fills. If your chart is selected, you can choose one of the pre-made sets and apply it to your chart.

The one issue we have with this relates to Apple’s habit of limiting your selection (they do this with the picture frames feature too). There are actually MORE styles available inside Keynote, you just can’t get to them. The easy way to get to those is simply to create the chart in a theme that uses the chart style you like and copy and paste it into your presentation. There is a way to edit a plist inside Keynote to open up all these other styles, but that’s a tutorial for another day.

Lastly, you can also drag your own styles or textures into the bars of your chart or manually change the colors of your chart bars by clicking on them till you see little white dots on the top and bottom of the bars and changing the style in the Graphic Inspector.

Have fun customizing your charts!

The trick here is that text itself is treated as separate from the text box. If you select the text box, and apply a shadow, it’s applied to all text inside the box. But if you double click the box to enter into the edit mode, and select the text itself, you can also apply a shadow to the text. Apply both and you get a very thick, dark shadow.

For more advanced looks, you can totally change the shadow settings on each one. One example is to make one shadow black and down to the right, and another shadow white and up to the left. This gives you a fake emboss look. This effects really works well on backgrounds that aren’t pure white or black as the shadows show up better.

You could also set both shadows to a zero offset and make them different colors. We tried one red one with a blur of 3 and a white one with a blur of 20. This gave us a nice white halo with a slight red tint closer in to the text.

The trick here is, instead of looking for some sort of advanced insert or import function, simply open a folder of photos in the Finder, select all of them (command-A) and drag the whole lot into the slide list on the left hand side of the Keynote window. Keynote will then import all your photos and stick one on each slide.

If you don’t want huge image files floating on your slides, you can also visit the Keynote prefs and check the box next to “Reduce placed images to fit on slides” before you import your photos. This will resize your images to fit on the slide. Thankfully, this feature doesn’t crop your photos, it simply resizes them and leaves either the top and bottom or sides hanging off the edges of the slide if the photo isn’t the same proportion as your slides. One issue with this feature though, is that it permanently changes each image, meaning it literally resizes your images and saves a new version inside your Keynote file. So if you were planning on enlarging and cropping some of your images after you import them, you may not want to use this feature.

One other catch on older versions of Keynote is that some versions have issues with the order. Keynote 09 appears to always sort photos on import alpha-numerically, but older versions sometimes would bring the photos in with no apparent order. The solution is to view your photos in List view in the finder and view by name before dragging them into Keynote.

• error -108 There is not enough disk space or there is a problem with the file.

User ericrmyers finally got a fix from AppleCare:

“In your home folder, open the library folder. Find the caches folder and drag it to the trash. Then go to the preferences folder and find the com.apple.iWork.Keynote.plist file and drag it to the trash. Restart your computer, and empty the trash. Like magic it fixed my problem with no re-dos of the files or turning off the all keyframes option. Apparently the preferences/cache files from iWork 08 can seriously screw up the new iWork 09.”

We’re hoping this is all that’s needed for this particular bug…it sure is annoying to create a huge presentation only to be stuck when you go to export it.

Step one of this tip is to create an outline in Pages. Just choose one of the sample outlines from the Template Chooser and enter your own information into it. Once you’ve got your outline created and saved (we assume you’ll use it for something else or you’d simply start creating the outline in Keynote instead), launch Keynote 09 and choose a theme.

Once you’ve got a new Keynote file open, switch back to your Pages document and select the whole outline (Command-A). Then switch back to Keynote but DO NOT paste. This next step is important. In Keynote, choose Outline from the View menu. Then click on the first slide in the outline list on the left side of the Keynote window. The easy way to do this is simply click on the little blue icon of a slide. The icon should end up with a light blue highlight around it if it’s selected.

Once you’ve selected the first slide, go ahead and paste your outline. You should see each top level bullet appear as a slide, and any sub level bullets will show up as bullets on those top level slides. If you need to restructure things, you can actually drag bullets around right in the Outline side bar in Keynote. You can even drag the slide icons up onto another slide and merge slides by dragging just under and to the right of another slide icon in the list (look for the little blue triangles that show where your data will go when you let go of the cursor).

Once you’ve gotten your outline into Keynote and you’ve restructured to your liking, you’ll want to fix one more style issue. For some reason, Keynote doesn’t style the pasted text. If you right (control) click each slide thumbnail and choose Reapply Master to Slide, this will fix the style and your data will be styled to match the master slides from the Theme that you chose.

On a side note, we tried this same tip in Keynote 08 and it put every outline line on a new slide. It still works, but it takes much more clean up than 09 does.

Click here to read “TUAW Tip: Video playback through Keynote transitions”

On a side note, we’ve done something similar in the past by actually taking a Keynote movie into Final Cut Pro and adding fancy transitions in that, then exporting the movie and placing that on a Keynote slide. It’s makes for some crazy effects, but it’s a heck of a lot of work. This tip is a much better technique since all it requires is taking a picture of the next slide in its starting state.

In Keynote 09, if you select any two objects (including photos and other placed objects (and choose Connection Line from the Insert menu, a line that “sticks” to both objects is inserted between them. You can recolor this line and treat it as any other line in Keynote (including adding a reflection to it if you so desire). What you can’t do is move where the line is stuck to each object. In our tests it appears that this is determined by the location of the two objects. Put them perfectly above or beside each other and the line sticks to the center of each. Put one at an angle to the other and the anchor moves around, sticking wherever it makes sense, even to the corner of one or the other of the objects.

If you’re a fan of curved lines, there’s a small white dot in the center of each connection line that you can drag to curve the line. If you curve the line a lot, you’ll see the anchor move with it. It’s all rather smooth, but again, you aren’t offered a lot of control. The only other adjustment you can make is dragging the little blue dot at either end of the connection line back toward the center of the line. This actually shortens the line, to the point where it doesn’t even touch the two shapes. It’s still anchored to them, it just doesn’t visibly touch them. Doing this with the Option key held down shrinks it from both ends. We’re not really sure why you’d want a floating connection line, but Apple thought enough to offer that feature anyway.

So there you have it, still no true “SmartArt” type tools, and no true flow charting tools, but at least Connection Lines are are decent start.

Step One: Setup Airport.

If you don’t already have Airport turned on, or you don’t have the Airport menu icon in your menu bar, this is the place to start. Otherwise, you can skip this step. Open the System Preferences, then go to Network. We’re assuming you can’t get on any wifi networks at this point or you wouldn’t need this tutorial, so you should see a red or yellow dot next to the Airport item in the left side bar. Click on the Airport item in the side bar and if Airport is off, click the Turn Airport On button. Then check the box to “Show Airport status in the menu bar.”

 

Step Two: Create the Ad-Hoc Network

At this point, you’re ready to create your own wireless network. Click on the Airport icon in the menu bar and choose Create Network… It should look like this:

Once you’ve chosen that, a little window will open allowing you to name your network. You also have the option to use a password. Here’s what it looks like:

Type in the Name of your network and if you want to password the network, check the Require Password box (this keeps everyone else out of your network), then click Okay.

 

• Tip: If you want to share lecture files with your group, don’t set a password for your network. You can then place files in the Public folder in your Home folder and others should be able to access them once they join your network (at least the mac users can. You could also turn on personal web sharing and serve up a fancy web page, though that’s a completely different tutorial for another time.

 

You’ve just created your own Wifi Network with your computer as the base unit. If you were successful, you should see an icon like this in your menu bar (though it probably won’t be green):

 

Step Three: Connect to your network with your iPhone or iPod Touch

On your touch device, tap on the Settings app. At this point you might want to set your iPhone in Airplane mode so that you don’t get interrupted by any phone calls in the middle of your presentation. Simply click the Airplane Mode slider to the On position. This will turn off the phone and wifi, but you will turn wifi back on, so don’t worry about that.

Next tap on the Wi-Fi option. When the panel appears click the Wi-Fi slider to the ON position to turn wifi back on. At this point you should see your new wifi network in the list.

Tap on your wifi network and if you chose to use a password, you’ll be prompted to enter it. Once connected you should see a check mark next to the network.

 

Step Four: Set up your app.

At this point, you might be using Apple’s Keynote Remote, or Wooji-Juice Stage Hand. Either way, you must first set up the host app, and then link to it with the touch app.

For Keynote Remote: In the case of the Apple remote, you simply visit the Keynote 09 prefs and choose Remote from the tool bar. With this screen open, switch to your device and launch the Keynote Remote app. If it doesn’t prompt you to connect, click the Settings button and choose New Keynote Link…

You’ll be given a pass code:

Your device should then show up in the Keynote prefs window on your Mac. Click the Link button:

and enter the code that’s on your device screen. Your device will now be linked. We found we had to quit and relaunch the iPhone app before it saw our computer, but once we did that, it worked fine.

• Shameless plug: Purchase Keynote Remote through this link and help out Keynoteuser.com

 

For Stage Hand: Launch Stage Hand on your device, then launch Stage Manager on your Mac. You should see your device in the Device list in Stage Manager.

Click on it and click the Pair button. You can now hide Stage Manager by hitting Command-H.

Your presentation (if it’s been saved in Keynote) will now show in Stage Hand. See the Wooji-Juice web site for more info on how to use Stage Hand. They’ve got a QuickStart and Support area that should get you through any issues.

NOTE: There is a new version of Stage Manager that works with Keynote 09 out now, so if you had issues, make sure you’ve got the newest version.

• Shameless plug: Purchase StageHand through this link and help out Keynoteuser.com

The bad news is, the option is only available for shape fills (for now at least). To access it, click on a shape and change the Fill to Advanced Gradient Fill. You’ll see a new gradient tool similar to more advanced design apps where you can add any number of colors to the gradient, and change where the center of each color shift happens. Here’s what it looks like (we’ve cropped the palette, so don’t freak on us):

At this point you can click in the empty area below the sample gradient and it will add a new color well. You can also drag the little nib above the gradient to change the center break point between colors. This gives you a huge amount of control over your gradients. Here we’ve chosen a radial gradient, changed the colors to a series of red and white, added a middle color to the gradient and changed the angle to 270°.

and here’s our shape:

You can see that while it’s selected we get a little line with blue dots at each end. Grabbing the and moving each dot changed where that end of the gradient lands, and how much of it is shown. In our example, dragging the upper dot will move the white highlight around and the closer it gets to the lower dot, the less you’ll see if the white (the red starts to take over). Dragging the bottom one will move the red end of the gradient around, and as it gets closer to the upper dot, you’ll see more white and less red.

The really cool trick though, is to shift-drag the whole line around. This lets you adjust where the gradient sits inside the shape, without changing the actual settings of the gradient. Here we’ve moved the whole gradient to the center of the object, without messing with the angle or relationship between the two blue dots.

And here’s the original shape with both blue dots moved around to give us a bit more of a globe feel:

As you can see, between the Fill Inspector and the little gradient control bar on the shape, you can make some pretty complex gradients for your shapes.

Now if Apple would just open it up to slide backgrounds, tables and chart fills, we’d really have something going.

 

 

The really weird thing is, someone on the Apple Discussions discovered that the XML file in Keynote still supports Web View, and if you open a Keynote 08 file that has a Web View item placed on a slide, it not only works in 09…you can change the url in 09 using the Hyperlink Inspector. Even the “Update automatically” option still works!

We’re not sure if Apple will leave this working, but since it does work, we figured we’d do those of you without a copy of Keynote 08 a favor and post a Keynote 08 file with a Web View object placed in it. Simply copy and paste this into your Keynote 09 presentation and change the url in the Hyperlink Inspector and you’re all set.

Download the Web View Keynote 08 file

If you downloaded Keynote immediately after Macworld 2009 to take a look at some of the features and you’ve been using it regularly, you’ve no doubt noticed the countdown on the days remaining of your trial. If you haven’t been using it regularly, you may want to launch it to see how many days you have left. As of a couple days ago, those first trials have begun to time out and you can no longer save or print. However, before you drag that iWork ’09 folder to the trash and delete it, you should know that the end of the trial is not necessarily the end of Keynote’s usefulness.

Unlike some other demos that lock you out of the app completely once they time out (requiring you to enter a serial to do anything), in Keynote, you still have access to all of the other features. This is where it’s utility lies. Say you’ve got an image and you want to remove the background using Instant Alpha. With Keynote, you can paste the image in as a bitmap (.jpg, .tiff, .png, etc.) perform the Instant Alpha, Copy the result, open Preview then do Command-N. Preview will display the information from the Clipboard as a PDF file that can be used in any other app on OSX that utilizes PDF’s (which is a LOT of apps). Similarly, you can use Keynote to go through your iPhoto library, grab an image, then Crop, give it a styled Frame and again Copy then do Command-N in Preview. In every case, you’ve got a high quality PDF file that can be resized and reused almost anywhere.

Another important side effect of only limiting saving and printing is that a timed out Keynote can still be used as a presentation player! If you’re creating presentations and emailing to a group of Mac users, you only need to purchase one copy of iWork. Everyone else can get the trial and they’ll be able to playback your full presentation. Add the iWork.com beta, and you don’t have to clog their email boxes. Combine all that with the above Preview tip, and the recipients can copy and paste your designs into their documents, annotate and collaborate by pasting into Preview, and more!

Of course, if true editing capability is needed on both ends, then you’d do well to have full copies of iWork for everyone. But, using the above, you may find a workflow that allows you to save costs while still getting your message across. Oh, one final tip. If you’ve got a group of presenters that have a habit of wanting to change your carefully laid out presentations when they’re on the road, have them download and use the trial version. It’s not as locked down as PowerPoint’s protection in that they can still change the contents of the slides as long as they don’t try to save, but, hey, it’s a step in the right direction!

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1854740&tstart=0

You can probably find those old these here:

Hard Drive/Library/Application Support/iWork/Keynote/

The culprits seem to be Leather book and Sandstone

One user mentioned that you could still double click the theme file to open it in Keynote, and then save it as a custom theme, which fixes the issue.

Thankfully, Apple say fit to give us an option. If you visit the Keynote prefs panel and General tab, you’ll see a new item called “Save new documents as packages.”

If you check this box, any new documents you create will automatically be saved in the old package format. If you’ve already created files with this preference off, it appears that simply doing a Save As doesn’t resave as a package. We found we had to create a new file (it’s best to use the same theme too) and then drag all the slides from the old document to the new one. Once we saved the new document, it was correctly created as a package file.

One a side note, those of you using Stage Hand to control your presentations from your iPhone will NEED to do this trick or Stage Hand won’t be able to find the presentations. We tested this and were able to use Stage Hand with Keynote 09 once our presentations were saved as packages (Stage Hand has since been updated to fix this issue).

UPDATE: Now that SlideShare.net supports Keynote 09 files, it’s likely that it ONLY supports the new zipped format. If you’re planning on sharing files online, we suggest NOT turning on the package format. If you need to crack open a package, you can add .zip to the end of the file name (name.key.zip) and double click it. Your file will be magically unzipped and you’ll be left with a .key package (make sure it ends with .key or it will break and turn into a plain folder).

Then, I started thinking. What, exactly, is Excel placing on the PasteBoard (The PasteBoard is that universal area from whence all copy and pasting comes from and goes)? Every app I know of at least places a PDF on the PasteBoard and Keynote should have no problem bringing that over. To check, I opened Preview, gave it a Command-N, and there was the PDF file as expected!

From prior problems with Keynote and copy/pasting, I have a copy of clipPDFservant on my Mac. I figured that if the PDF data is there, perhaps it’s suffering from the same iWork limitation that affects PDF’s cropped by Preview. Sure enough, after running clipPDFservant, I was able to paste the image data into Keynote, Numbers, and Pages. Again, it’s not as nice as being able to paste the actual cells and data, but for presentation purposes, it should do just fine.

You can find more info about clipPDFservant and the instructions for it’s installation and use on this page.

We emailed ourselves the Frames.key file as an example and took a screenshot (made by holding down the Home button then quickly pressing and releasing the power button). The top one was done by dragging the the file into Mail. Knowing how many mail systems aren’t savvy of iWork’s package format, your file is compressed before being sent, with .key.zip being it’s extension. As you see, it shows up as a tappable file and will open the presentation as expected.

In the second case, we first performed another function on the file that many users may do from habit when emailing packages… we right clicked and chose “Compress Frames.key”. This creates a zip file as well, but with an important difference, this file does NOT include a .key extension, so when you drag it into Mail, it becomes Frames.zip. As you see, this second file cannot be viewed on the iPhone.

The new functionality is great in that it gives us parity with the PowerPoint crowd (you could view .ppt files with the prior iPhone software). However, the package nature of iWork documents means that a little more care will need to be taken to ensure that recipients using iPhones loaded with the 2.0 software can view your content.

When I see articles like this, it makes me wonder how amazing it would be if Apple made iWork’s XML editable by any app on your Mac. Then, instead of using a QuickTime movie in your Pro projects, you could do a rough draft of the motion you’re after in Keynote and then open that file in Motion or Final Cut Pro for tweaking and adding of effects. I’ve got my fingers crossed for Snow Leopard!