What's New in iWork '06?
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
What's New in Keynote 3?
New Themes
As with Pages 2, Keynote 3 includes a bunch of new visuals. There are some new themes to play with. Here are just some of them:
Tools and UI Changes
The additional features in iWork '06 mean that not everything you create will necessarily show up, or work properly, in iWork '05. When saving documents, there's now an option to save them in such a way that they'll still be viewable in iWork '05, even if the newer features stay hidden.
Exporting has been improved considerably. Now the export sheet looks more like a preferences window, and choosing to export as images gives you the option to do so directly to iPhoto:
The export automatically creates a new album in iPhoto, which you have to name before the process completes. Images can be exported as .jpg or .tiff files.
Elsewhere in the export sheet is the new option to export your slides as a new iDVD project. You can choose what kind of video size you'd like (4:3 or widescreen 16:9), and what quality. There are settings (in seconds) for slide and build duration.
Keynote saves both a .dvdproj file and a QuickTime movie in your desired location, ready for messing with in iDVD.
Another very nice new feature is the Light Table view of slides. This is especially useful when editing large presentations, or old ones whose details you have forgotten. It gives you a good overview of the structure of the presentation and reminds you what you did last time. Adding new slides is a Control-click away; re-ordering slides is drag-simple.
As in Pages, you can now edit all images directly within Keynote. Although it's worth mentioning that Keynote's image adjust panel has a nice little Auto Levels button which is not present in iPhoto 6.
Charts
As tables have been given more oomph in Pages 2, so charts have a bit more sparkle in Keynote 3.
Of course, the smarter tables are available in Keynote too, so you can include the same kind of live calculations in a presentation that you might put in a spreadsheet. But the new charts sport improved three-dimensional visuals.
Like much of what's new in Keynote, this is not really radical change, but an evolutionary growth of what was already on offer. For most people, both presenters and audiences, a chart is a chart, and its most important attribute is displaying figures in an instantly understandable way. The extra dimension is not something many people will be buying iWork '06 for, but if you regularly need to include charts in your presentations, you'll probably be pleased to see this extra functionality.
