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Issues in PowerPoint v.X |
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- Soft drop shadows on certain objects or text will turn into a hard shadow
- SOME soft shadows will be converted (along with the object) to a bitmapped image with a dithered shadow
- Photo Cutouts stop working-this can be fixed in PPT
- Bullets sometimes are misaligned
- Transparency can sometimes be lost-this can be fixed in PPT
- Soft edged images or images with transparent areas don't display properly. Sometimes they will have bumpy edges, sometimes they will have a white background
- Some objects and tables will convert to large bit-mapped images, and sometimes the quality can be bad
- Most transitions will convert to lesser quality PPT equivalents
- As far as I can tell, Charts ALWAYS come across as a bitmapped image
- Text inside a shape does NOT wrap correctly
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Issues in PowerPoint 2004 |
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- Photo Cutouts stop working-this can be fixed in PPT NOTE: Keynote 2 seemed to have fixed this.
- Bullets sometimes are misaligned
- Transparenty Tiff images don't work properly. Usually have a white background where the transparency was. PNG and PDF work fine.
- Some objects and tables will convert to large bit-mapped images, but quality is usually okay
- Most transitions will convert to lesser quality PPT equivalents, though you can put BACK the cube rotate
- As far as I can tell, Charts ALWAYS come across as a bitmapped image, but quality is usually okay
- Text inside a shape does NOT wrap correctly
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So, we have this nice list of stuff that breaks in PPT. But all is not lost. Some of this is not fixable, but you CAN salvage the basic look of your slides by adjusting a few things on your slides in Keynote, and then by adjusting a few things once you're in PPT. First, here's a few tips on adjusting things in Keynote BEFORE exporting:
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Adjusting for PowerPoint v.X |
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- Drop shadows sometimes make it through the export, but it's a good idea to turn them OFF, and then add them back in PPT. Otherwise some objects get a nasty dithered shadow that looks terrible.
- If you have any transparent Gif files, you may want to replace them with a PNG or other file format. Gif files that have transparency usually end up with a WHITE background instead of a transparency background
- In some cases overlapped images can come through as one image. If you have this problem, you might want to move your images around a bit in Keynote so they don't overlap.
- Gradients with one color that is transparent come across badly dithered. One example is the fade out overlay that comes with our Frames theme. Thankfully, overlays come over as just that, overlays. And you can recreate something similar in PPT as long as it only uses colors, and not an image.
- Sometimes if an image was flipped in Keynote, once in ppt it will be flipped back to the old direction. You can easily flip it again in PPT, putting it back in the right direction.
- If you're going to use PDF images, make sure you make them as large as needed in Keynote before exporting. Once in PPT, they become bitmapped, and making them larger will look bad.
- Transparent Tiff images and Native PSD files don't work properly in PPT, so if you can, use PNG instead. These images look just like they do in Keynote.
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Adjusting for PowerPoint 2004 |
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- Animated Gifs that have transparency look fine in layout mode, but when playing, only the first frame appears correctly, on the other frames, the transparent areas turn white. If you can, stay away from transparent animated gifs.
- Sometimes if an image was flipped in Keynote, once in ppt it will be flipped back to the old direction. You can easily flip it again in PPT, putting it back in the right direction.
- If you're going to use PDF images, make sure you make them as large as needed in Keynote before exporting. Once in PPT, they become bitmapped, and making them larger will look bad.
- Transparent Tiff images and Native PSD files don't work properly in PPT, so if you can, use PNG instead. These images look just like they do in Keynote.
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This list is just for reference. The best way to learn if your presentation is going to work in Keynote is to export it and then look it over. Things will look terrible at first glance, especially if you used lots of photo cutouts. Don't worry! Your Photo Cutouts come over as part of the background and can be fixed. Right now you're just looking for dithered images and floating photos that now have a white background. These things can't be easily fixed in PPT and must be addressed in Keynote.
(if you're using Keynote 1x)
Once you've exported your presentation and opened it in PowerPoint, you can see something is REALLY wrong with most slides. The Photo Cutouts, while intact, have been moved to the background (or master) of each slide. Thankfully, this is easy to fix, but for a LONG presentation, it can be time consuming. Click on a slide you want to fix, and we'll go through the steps to fix it:
Step 1.
Select Master>Slide Master from the View Menu
This will take you to the master slide for the particular slide you were on when you selected Slide Master from the menu. NOTE! PowerPoint actually supports multiple Master Slides, you just can't see them in a list like in Keynote. EACH slide has its own Master, so you'll have to go through this process for EACH slide that uses Photo Cutouts.
Step 2.
Select the Photo Cutout overlay image and CUT it from the Master Slide. You can use Command-X or select Cut from the Edit menu.
Here you can see the overlay selected ready to be Cut from the Master Slide
Step 3.
Click the little Close button you see floating over the Master Slide. This will take you back to the regular version of the slide.
Step 4.
Paste the overlay back on the slide using Command-V, or choose Paste from the File menu.
Step 5.
With the overlay still selected (that means after you paste, don't click on ANYTHING yet) click on the drawing tools menu button (if the tools aren't showing, choose Toolbars>Drawing from the View menu). From the Draw pop-up menu choose Arrange>Send to Back. This will send the cutout to the back of the slide.
At this point the overlay will still be BEHIND your objects, but we want to start here so that you won't have to go digging for other images that are supposed to be in FRONT of the cutout.
Step 6.
Click on any image you want to put behind the cutout and apply Step 5 to that image, so that it ends up behind the cutout.
Here is a before and after shot of a slide from the Frames PowerUser sample presentation:
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Before fixing the cutout
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After fixing the cutout
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You may also have to use the Send Backward/Send Forward commands in the Drawing tools menu to move other images back and forth on the slide. In this example, the coffee seeds were way out in front and needed to be placed behind everything, so I fixed that once the cutout was in the right place.
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Once you've gotten the Photo Cutout fixed on your slide, the rest is pretty easy. Any images that need shadows added back can be taken care of. Here are two other items that you'll want to check:
Fixing Shadows in v.X
If you turned off the shadow of an object or text in Keynote and want to turn it back on in PPT, you can use the Shadow menu in the Drawing Tool bar, or turn on the Shadow palette from that same menu:
Once the palette is open, you can move it around and use it to turn on the shadow for certain objects, and move the shadow around using the nudge buttons on the palette.
Fixing Transparency
If you lost transparency of an object in the conversion, or you turned it off before exporting, you can reapply it in PPT. The easiest way to do this is to Control-Click on the object and choose Format Picture or Format Text from the pop-up. A special attributes window appears that allows you to adjust the transparency of the object or text box.
Fixing Transitions in PPT v.X
Well, this one is the biggest let down. PowerPoint v.X just doesn't have anything close to the cool transitions in Keynote. The best you can do is use the QuickTime Cross Fade transtion, and even that doesn't always play smoothly, even on a fast machine.
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Bring up the Slide Transition window
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Choose Select Quicktime Transition
from the Pop-up menu
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Then select Cross fade from under the Transitions category and hit Okay
This will get you the closest thing to Keynote's Cross dissolve transition. You can also try some of the other QuickTime Transitions, as they all probably look better than those built into PowerPoint.
Fixing Transitions in PPT 2004
Things aren't quite so bad in PowerPoint 2004, but almost. This version adds a cube rotate and smoth fade between slides. The only problem is that the cube doesn't look nearly as good as the one in Keynote, and even the slow setting for the cross fade looks fast.
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Bring up the Slide Transition window
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Choose one of the Cube transitions or Fade Smoothly
from the Pop-up menu
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You can also fix gradients in PPT, usually by replacing them, and you can also create objects that have a gradient that has transparency in it by using the Fill Effects, under that same Format box mentioned above. You won't be able to fix the bumpy edges on your images, and you might not like the way the Keynote charts convert to a bitmapped image, but that's the breaks of this version of PPT NOT supporting transparency and translucency correctly. Also, you might find that some bullets come in misaligned. I could not find ANY way in PPT to adjust this, so I had to just make the bullets smaller using the Bullets & Numbers window.
PowerPoint 2004 supports true soft drop shadows, true transparency (Alpha channels, but it's not supported in Tiff or PS images) and even contains the ever popular Cube Rotate transition (though as I stated earlier, it doesn't look as good as Apple's). Most things look GREAT in PPT 2004 if you follow the rules above and fix the cutouts.
Hopefully this tutorial will help those who need to movie their stuff over into PowerPoint. It's not perfect, but it is usable. One final technique that many designers use is to make their slides in Keynote or even Photoshop and simply take a screen shot or export from Photoshop as a full screen Tiff image. It's not the best solution, but it does get you great looking slides!
Keynote 2 now correctly exports photo cutouts to PPT, so you no longer have to do the fix mentioned on this page to get your photo cutouts to appear correctly in PPT.
We're not yet sure if Apple has added any bug fixes or new features to the PPT export in Keynote 3.
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In many cases Exporting to PPT can be pretty painless, but there are some gotchas that you should know about. Since the current version of PPT for Mac doesn't support some of the features of Keynote, if your Keynote file is chock full of Keynote goodness, you may find that your pretty presentation looks pretty lousy in PPT.
