I have been using Macs now for seven years. For the most part, I have always used Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) for Mac. Why? For one, PowerPoint was the first slideshow application that was introduced to me—as it probably was for most people. I had experimented with iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) a little while when I bought my very first Mac, but not in much depth.
Coming into Small Dog over a month ago, one of my first big projects was to create a Keynote presentation for the annual Apple Business Review in Cupertino, California.
It’s pretty obvious that both allow you to create slides that can contain: text, tables, charts, graphs, photos, movies, etc. And with each, you can get as fancy as you’d like with visual themes and animation.
At first glance, Keynote seems like a pretty minimalistic application and one might assume that it’s a very basic presentation tool. But it’s not—it’s quite powerful. One great feature is the ability to integrate iLife into Keynote, pulling photos, music and video from iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie. Apple makes it super easy to simply drag-and-drop objects from other applications. And honestly, who can’t handle a little dragging-and-dropping?
For me, Keynote takes it home with the great Inspector tool. It’s the control panel for your presentation. It’s a much easier way to navigate through different options compared to the busy-ness of the toolbar in PowerPoint. It’s also very similar to the way design programs from Adobe operate, and since Creative Suite is what I’m used to using, it was second nature for me in Keynote.
Long story short, for those of you who are strict PowerPoint users, I’d suggest giving Keynote a try. I think you’ll love how simple it is to create a visually appealing, powerful slideshow. Another great, user-friendly Apple application!