Duplicate bulleted lists in Keynote using Preview
Feb 08, '05 09:17:00AM
Contributed by: derPlau
Much to my disappointment, Keynote 2 still doesn't allow for more than one set of automatic bullet points. (Shame, Apple! Why do you insist on crippling what is otherwise such a great piece of software?). And, though the OmniGraffle-based solution offered by keynoteuser.com presumably still works, I'd rather not buy OmniGraffle just for that one function.
As it turns out, though, it's possible to do basically the same thing using Preview. Note that this approach takes bullet points made in Keynote, and turns them into exact PDF copies. This allows you to use your single box of bullet points for something else, but the text in the PDF copies isn't directly editable -- so if you want to change that text, you've got to start over again. Fortunately, the approach is quite straightforward:
- Within Keynote, make the bullet points you want to copy.
- Select the entire text box with all the bullet points in it. If your text insertion point is in the text box, this requires clicking somewhere outside the box, then clicking the text box again -- the resizing handles must be visible around the edges of the selection), and copy it.
- Switch to Preview and make a new document (File: New from Clipboard, or just Command-N). The new document will appear, complete with your bullet points.
- Select any or all of the bullet points you want to use by choosing the Selection marquee from the "tool mode" button set -- or choose "Select Tool" in the Tools menu, or just hit command-3.
- Copy and paste the selection back to Keynote.
This "make a PDF by making a new document in Preview" feature is a very useful (and, I think, undocumented) one. It also allows you to select individual bits of other PDFs and make new PDFs out of them.)
[robg adds: We've covered Preview's PDF cut-and-paste capabilities before, but this is a good use for them. Keynote's inability to have more than one bulleted list on a slide is a fairly glaring oversight. This workaround will let you at least display two bulleted boxes on one slide, but you won't have any "build" control over the second group of bullets -- since it's just a graphic, it will come in as an object. Making both boxes build can be done a number of ways, but they're all a bit of a pain (the keynoteuser.com tutorial linked above explains one way to do it).]
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