I was looking for a way to do what should be a very simple thing: create a presentation from a folder or selection of images, with a separate image on each slide in full size. However, it seems that neither Keynote or PowerPoint can do this natively.
I found a few things that were supposed to work, such as this VBA script for PowerPoint that's supposed to do such a thing, but couldn't get it to run, probably because of path translation problems from Windows.
There's also a Keynote AppleScript (download), which is supposed to convert an iPhoto Album to slides, but I can't get it to run. It seems to reference a property in the script that neither my Keynote 2 or Keynote 3 seems to have in its script library, even when I install WiredFlux's Keynote Scripting Plugin.
So I had to make my own for both. For Keynote, I created an Automator application (136KB download, macosxhints mirror) which allows you to select a folder or files, and it will resize them to 800x600 and stick them in the frontmost presentation. I had to use Automator, since the make image slides function didn't seem to work in Applescript. If you have larger resolution presentations, you will have to change the size in the Automator workflow.
For PowerPoint, I was able to do it with a combination of AppleScript and Visual Basic in this script, which resizes the images to their maximum size for the slide, and then assigns the notes to be the image file name. I can't seem to get the slide title to set correctly, so if anyone can figure that out, let us know. Paste this into Script Editor and run with an open blank presentation in PowerPoint.
[robg adds: For the Keynote/Automator script, you need to also open a blank Keynote presentation first. When I first ran the action, it created a temp folder on the desktop, then quit. I ran it from Automator directly, and it was dying on step 4, which tries to select the temporary folder. I just had to re-point step 4 (along with step 7, which trashes the temp folder when done) to the now-in-existence temp folder, and then it worked fine.]
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20060305235205688