Apple's Keynote is the first major-company presentation software in years to step up to bat against ruling giant Microsoft PowerPoint (PPT). As an instructor and conference speaker, and as a Mac owner who uses PowerPoint and similar programs, I was interested in this new contender, especially since it was based on a program built for his own use by Steve Jobs, head of Apple.
Jobs introduced Keynote during MacWorld in January, 2003. I'm reviewing version 1.1, Keynote's first major point release (by contrast, PowerPoint has been around for a decade). Keynote 1.1 is ready for prime time. Mac diehards will appreciate the perfect Mac interface and how Keynote exploits Mac hardware features. Presenters and courseware authors will like its fine graphics, modern themes, user interface, and PowerPoint interoperability. You'll be seeing more and more Keynote presentations over the next months and years.
Keynote's interface departs from the traditional slideshow program. Older programs only showed one of Text View, Slide View or Slide Sorter. The Normal view in PowerPoint divides the screen into two columns, the text view and the slide view. If you request Slide Sorter, both columns are hidden by the slide miniatures.
Keynote revitalizes the user interface by integrating a slide sorter into the main view. This Navigator shows both order and indentation; both can easily be changed by drag-and-drop. The sorter functions sort of like a tree control; the arrows beside the slides allow you to hide an entire section of the presentation. Hidden sections are hidden both from editing and during presentation of the slide show; they show up as collapsed boxes in the sorter view. But if you click on them you can still edit them. Simple, neat, elegant.
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Selecting Outline view makes Keynote display what PowerPoint does; PowerPoint 10 on Windows lets you view slide miniatures beside the main text but does not have the indentation/collapse feature; PowerPoint X on the Mac does not have this capability at all.
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Keynote also features guidelines, yellow lines that pop up when you have one object centered over another (vertically, horizontally, or both), making it easier to line up elements on a page. This happens not just at the center of the page, but whenever one item of any kind is on top of another.
Keynote takes advantage of Mac hardware. Most modern notebooks have VGA output, but on a Mac PowerBook G4, you can treat the LCD panel and the VGA port as two separate displays. Keynote lets you present on either display (or both), and optionally, have the other display showing just your presenters' notes. If you wanted to keep your traditional Mac desktop on view while running Keynote only on the external display, you could disable this and just drag Keynote to the second display, of course, but using the Present on Secondary Display provides a smoother transition into the show. Of course, because it's a Mac, this option is silently ignored when there is no secondary display plugged in.
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These two full-scale presentation programs have many underlying similarities. Both have "themes" for slide design. Both have "master pages" like "main title," "title and bulleted text," and "title only," in each theme. You can't compare the programs on every point; each has some features that the other lacks. Let's compare some specific features.
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Every New Presentation starts off by Choosing a Theme. Keynote comes with a dozen professional-quality presentation themes with high-resolution graphics, using some of the designer fonts that ship with Mac OS X. You can design new themes and exchange them with friends and colleagues. Figure 5 shows some Keynote themes, plus four that I created; those with PPT in the name are originally from PowerPoint.
PPT gives you a choice between its AutoContent Wizard (which lets you choose from about 20 partly-filled-in templates such as Brainstorming, Training, and Communicating Bad News) and 20 graphical Designs (what Keynote calls Themes).
PowerPoint gives you a variety of toolbars. Keynote gives you one customizable toolbar, plus a floating panel called the Inspector, analogous to the PPT Formatting Palette (see Figure 6). The Inspector lets you change the properties of the selected slide or object, and has eight sub-panels:
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Keynote is designed to run on a Mac, where good drawing tools like Adobe Illustrator and Omni Group's OmniGraffle abound. So the builders of Keynote did not feel obliged to build in very much graphics functionality. Keynote's Shape Tools are fairly limited; you can draw lines, circles, rectangles, triangles, and arrows (see Figure 7). The Inspector lets you permute these in a lot of ways, but it's still not going to put Illustrator out of a job. PowerPoint has a much larger variety of built-in shapes (like star, lightning bolt, smiley face, etc.) as well as "callouts" (like comic book "talk balloons" and "thought balloons"). For some kinds of talks, PowerPoint's predefined callouts list is a useful tool.
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This tools limitation extends to the Chart Editor. I wanted to produce a chart showing the number of pigs a farmer would have to sell at market to buy a new pickup truck (numerical values used are from my memory of a talk by Farmer Ralph and should not be cited in further research). What I wanted was to produce a column showing several pigs stacked on one another. With Keynote's Chart Editor, I couldn't do it at all. With PowerPoint's Chart Format, each column got one giant pig stretched to different sizes (see Figure 2). Using Adobe Illustrator, I was able to get just the right effect (see Figure 8). In fact, leaving drawing to a "real" drawing tool is the right mindset for Mac users. MS Windows users, used to having each application have its own moderately useful but slightly different set of drawing tools, may find Keynote's approach limiting. Mac users will find PowerPoint's Add Clip Art, which occupies a toolbar slot and a menu position, plus its own dialog, rather silly. "Why", they'd ask, "not just drag from a Finder (Windows people: think Explorer) window, or from iPhoto, or from any other draw program?" The two groups of users have different expectations.
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On the plus side, Keynote's drawing tools use the Mac graphics toolkits: Quartz, GL, and so on. So any object (text, bitmap, drawing, imported PDF, etc.) can be rotated, resized, or most interestingly, made partly transparent (transparent objects let you see some of what is behind them, like the Dock (task bar) at the bottom of most Mac screen shots). This lets you generate very nice graphics, and gives you control over how dark things will appear (see this example).
PPT offers the corporate crowd the Organization Chart feature, a special set of drawing tools just for org charts. Again, the Mac user may prefer a separate specialized tool such as OmniGraffle, but if your organization gets re-organized often and it's your job to break the bad news to the troops, you might find it handy to have the tool right in your presentation software. If you use PowerPoint to run meetings, you may find its Meeting Minder tool, a text window with the ability to schedule tasks, useful. (Mac users: think TextEdit with a push button to add the contents into iCal as a ToDo or Event.) One tool PowerPoint has that should be incorporated into future revisions of Keynote is the "Rehearse Timings" feature. This can't be a separate tool because PowerPoint saves the timings and lets you see, during a "live" presentation, how you are doing compared to your rehearsal timings. Good for people who like to finish on time!
Another Keynote feature is Photo pages. Each theme has various pages, into which you can paste a bitmap file that will be masked perfectly for a professional appearance.
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With its ten-year lead over Keynote, PPT is faster at I/O-related operations (such as loading/saving and changing the theme of a presentation while editing), and offers some editing capabilities not yet in Keynote, such as global replacement of fonts. But Keynote's Mac designers have given their usual thoroughness to polishing the user interface. For example, when switching from editing to running your slide show, Keynote View->Play Slideshow starts at the current slide, which is optimal for the two common cases: either you just opened the slide show file (so the first slide is the current slide) or you're editing and you want to see how your edits to the current page look in full-screen. There are two shortcuts for this: the Play button in the main toolbar and the keyboard shortcut (Alt-Command-P). PowerPoint doesn't seem to have any shortcuts, and always shows the slideshow from the beginning.
For another example, when you're in a slide show, both programs accept the Escape key to get back into editing mode. Keynote also accepts the common "Q" (for quit). It is the sum of these many tiny optimizations that makes Keynote seem easier to use than its competitors.
On the other hand, one thing I miss from other Mac applications -- even TextEdit (!) -- is the ability to make selected text bigger or smaller with Command+ and Command-, respectively. This would come in very handy for copy fitting: when editing Titles or bullets that are just a bit too long for the line and you don't want to devote another line to them, for example.
Keynote advertises that it can import PDF files, among other formats. When I saw the advertisement I thought I'd be able to import the PDF handout from one of my old presentations. But PDF import is designed for images and graphics. It will import the first page of a PDF and place it in a slide, but it will not treat it as text, so you can't import a whole presentation.
Keynote can import PPT files (but not templates). True to the original meaning of "open systems" (i.e., interoperable), Keynote will also export its presentation into Microsoft PowerPoint format. This is a welcome departure from programs that will import but not export other formats. Importing and exporting of PPT files worked well, though some fine details were lost, such as the path for PPT word art. (At least on 1.0; I have not re-tested this on 1.1, since I've since removed PowerPoint from my Mac).
While most presentations are designed to be presented by a human speaker, you often want a handout for those who can't attend the presentation. Keynote gives you these options:
The Print Handout prints four very small slides at the side of a mostly-blank page; this is good for people with excellent vision who want lots of room to write notes. I prefer to use Print Slides and set the standard Mac Print->Layout to request two-up printing; I find the slides more readable. I also usually tell it to print dark backgrounds as white, print borders, and print slide numbers, but these are all personal preferences.
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PowerPoint also allows you to export to QuickTime, but I got my only "PowerPoint has unexpectedly quit" dialog on that one. One nice feature of PowerPoint is the ability to export as HTML, which lets people see a basic view of the show without special viewers. This creates a navigator on the left with a link to each page. These presentations worked fine in several browsers, with exceptions like single quotes not printing correctly in the titles (though they worked in the slide section). This is common enough -- web browsers are everywhere, after all -- and Apple's iPhoto offers it, so presumably Keynote will get this ability soon.
Keynote is one of the first (probably the first) commercial slideshow programs to use XML as its native save file format. Each presentation is saved in a directory named PresentationName.key. Included in this folder is an XML file with the extension ".apxl" (for Apple Presentation XML). The XML Schema that regulates this file format is publicly available on Apple's web site. Also included in the .key directory are various images, such as the background image and various bitmaps. Each of these is stored in a separate TIFF/JPEG file.
This is a departure from received wisdom in the slide show software world, but it actually makes sense in a world where 100GB disks are becoming the norm. And having a publicly documented file format does mean it's more likely that other programs will be developed that can generate Keynote presentations.
There is information on the file format at developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2002/tn2067.html. Annoyingly, each save removes and re-creates this directory, which messes up CVS and other file librarian systems that keep revision control files in the same directory.
On the issue of importing, by the way, if you have a plain text file with slide titles in column one and bullets indented by a tab stop, PowerPoint can import this into a presentation. Keynote cannot yet do this, which is a bit surprising, given the UNIX orientation of some parts of Mac OS X. Perhaps this will be included soon. PowerPoint has auto-save and incremental save, and its save file format is smaller, so opening and saving are faster.
There are several places where Keynote and PowerPoint provide the same feature but under a different name. My favorite example is transitions, the notion of having part of a slide appear, either by dissolving or by sliding in. PowerPoint calls them Animations (and has some confusion in naming them -- selecting one from the format Menu sometimes has it show up with a different name in the Formatting Palette). Keynote calls them Builds (I never would have thought to call them that). Both Keynote and PPT do a good job in transitions; PPT has more variety, but some are garish.
Microsoft seems committed to the Apple platform, because they have a leading market share there in the presentation software area. There are few other good complete office suites for Mac OS X. There is an early Mac version of the UNIX-based and free Open Office at www.openoffice.org/, but it requires the X Window system, and they don't expect to have a native port until "Q1 2006" (how's that for long term planning?) and the inexpensive ThinkFree Office Suite. I'm sure there are others; I apologize for any that I've missed. PowerPoint (and most of Microsoft Office) can be said to be multi-platform (well, at least two-platform): they can be run both on Microsoft Windows and the Mac.
The same cannot be said for Keynote, which depends on OS X features like Quartz, GL graphics, and QuickTime. It seems unlikely that there will be a version of Keynote for Microsoft Windows anytime soon, and it's not clear that Apple wants to try marketing software to run on MS Windows anyway (or that they would know how ...). For now, at least, PowerPoint is two-platform and Keynote is single-platform. That said, both can export into several cross-platform formats, including PDF, and of course PPT format.
Keynote 1 has hit the ground running pretty well. You can import PowerPoint presentations, and you can export your presentations into PPT files, PDF, or QuickTime for distribution. A Mac iBook or TiBook with Keynote makes an excellent "road warrior" platform for presenting your ideas effectively and with style. As mentioned, I've removed PowerPoint from my Mac notebook; Keynote does it all. Watch for more and more people using Keynote.
My Keynote site www.darwinsys.com/training/keynote will contain the sample presentations and viewables made from them, as well as other contributed goodies.
Ian F. Darwin has worked in the computer industry for three decades: with Unix since 1980, Java since 1995, and OpenBSD since 1998. He is the author of two O'Reilly books, Checking C Programs with lint and Java Cookbook, and co-author of Tomcat: The Definitive Guide with Jason Brittain.
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