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I found Keynote disappointing in many ways
Authored by: Mitchell on Jan 11, '03 03:41:57PM
Although Keynote has a lot to like about transitions and handling images with transparency and the like, I found using it when my copy arrived yesterday to be ultimately a frustrating experience.

1: The graphing module does not permit you to graph one variable against another. In other words, it isn't possible to plot a simple equation, x vs. y. It's adorable when the x axis values are all equally spaced, or they're just labels, but there isn't even the equivalent of what MS Office would call a "scatter" chart. This makes the product crippled for engineering use.

Half the time, I create graphs in Excel and just paste them as pictures in PowerPoint anyway. Still, since you can't edit the line and legend styles anymore when you do this, as you can in PowerPoint, it's not as helpful.

2: Mastering works funny. The term "master" is used a little differently in Keynote, and means more like what the term "Slide Layout" means in PowerPoint. That's fine.. I didn't expect the terminology to be compatible completely. But what is a nuisance is the frames for photos in the masters don't actually seem to bear any relationship to the photos you import. It's almost as if the embossed frame in the Letterpress theme, for example, was just a few pixels on the background graphic rather than some feature I could snap a photo to, or resize to fit a photo, or something.

In PowerPoint, you can use Insert - > Picture -> From File... with a photo placeholder selected, and it will insert the picture right where you want it, and size it properly. Then, in the formatting palette, you can make changes to opacity, size, borders, and so forth. If I insert a photo in keynote, it shows up at full size, which is often larger than the entire presentation.

Another deviation with mastering vs. layout is the treatment of text and graphics. If I reapply a slide layout in PowerPoint, using the menu or a toolbar button, it changes the sizes of the text boxes for title and bullet points and the positions of the picture and graph elements to their defaults, which I can change on the slide master. But if I try the same thing in Keynote, it also resets the colours, fills, and so forth of any graphics.

3. The control of text size is limited to that cocoa text palette thing. I must be the only one around who detests it because I've seen limited complaint about it. But there is no keyboard shortcut nor toolbar button for making text smaller or larger, as PowerPoint provides. When you switch themes, for example, you don't have an easy way of shrinking text or growing it to make the titles and so forth fit in the space allotted for them.

On the whole, I'm predisposed to like Keynote. The transitions are pretty and the themes look pleasant enough. But for serious work, it's not there yet. I might use it for my next big presentation, but the charts will all be created in PowerPoint and Keynote used solely as a slide show application (provided I can get them to import properly..there are some minor issues with the size of text boxes and such causing longish titles to be clipped). If I'd had a day to play with it before buying, I probably wouldn't have.

Mitchell

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I found Keynote disappointing in many ways
Authored by: swilcox on Jan 11, '03 05:52:58PM

" But what is a nuisance is the frames for photos in the masters don't actually seem to bear any relationship to the photos you import. It's almost as if the embossed frame in the Letterpress theme, for example, was just a few pixels on the background graphic rather than some feature I could snap a photo to, or resize to fit a photo, or something."

I think you're not seeing the fact that these photo frames are alpha channel cutouts. The manual explains: drop a photo onto the slide canvase and then send it to the back. The photo frame on the master will act as a mask. You can then resize, move, rotate, set transparency, etc your picture inside the frame.

In fact, I played around a bit in Photoshop today and created my own images with alpha channel cutouts. You can then easily import (save them as TIFFs in PS and use Edit->place in Keynote) them into Keynote to create your own master slide backgrounds. This is very powerful stuff. Apple absolutely got this part right.



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I found Keynote disappointing in many ways
Authored by: Mitchell on Jan 11, '03 07:29:14PM
Yes, I see you're right about that. RTFM, Mitchell.

Any insight about the other two things?

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I found Keynote disappointing in many ways
Authored by: swilcox on Jan 11, '03 10:27:58PM

"RTFM, Mitchell. Any insight about the other two things?"

Ha! I groused about the thin manual when I opened the box, but it's actually pretty good. I see someone else addressed the font issue. I don't know about the chart problems. I rarely use charts. I do use tables a lot though, and the tools that are available there seem pretty good for a v.1.0 product.




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I found Keynote disappointing in many ways
Authored by: Mitchell on Jan 12, '03 12:42:30AM
There is a subtlety to making your own alpha channel masks, though. If you look in the Keynote inspector carefully, some masters have "Image fill" and others have "color fill", with the image placed the way you did it, with Edit --> Place --> Choose...

If you open the Keynote Package, and find your way to Contents --> Resources --> English.lproj --> Themes there are theme files, themselves packages, that you can open. These contain the tiffs which you can use to create your own masks for other photo layouts. Nice to have a consistent starting point.

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I found Keynote disappointing in many ways
Authored by: Scripter12 on Jan 11, '03 09:18:07PM

3. The control of text size is limited to that cocoa text palette thing...

Click on fonts in the Keynote toolbar to get the font tool. At the bottom there is a popup menu. Select Edit Sizes. Click the box that enables the slider, set the limits then click done. Now you can smoothly vary the size of the type to fit the box in Keynote.



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I found Keynote disappointing in many ways
Authored by: dshoskes on Jan 16, '03 11:04:43AM

So far, keynote's not doing it for me either. I use PP exclusively to make medical talks, usually given at meetings or courses. Typically they insist on a .ppt file for the presentation. Since the windoze machine doesn't have the nifty new apple fonts, the results look crappy. The exported file is huge: a 3 slide sample with only text was a 2.4 MB .ppt file.

Admittedly I only glanced at the manual, but changing font and background color was not intuitive. It looks like I will have to make a whole set of themes on my own and that also doesn't look like a simple proposition. I love the idea of a built in chart generator, but without error bars, I will never use it. Finally, I am surprised they didn't include all the powerpoint slide layouts. I particularly need title + 2 side by side bulleted columns.

I certainly want to make this work and to use the nifty and unique transitions to wow the crowd, but it seems as though I will have to work mostly in pp still and then import.



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