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Overview of Keynote User Interface

Lesson 2 from: Intro to Apple iWork - Keynote

Kevin Allgaier

Overview of Keynote User Interface

Lesson 2 from: Intro to Apple iWork - Keynote

Kevin Allgaier

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Lesson Info

2. Overview of Keynote User Interface

Kevin shares insider tips on picking the right template and customizing your presentation in Keynote.

Lesson Info

Overview of Keynote User Interface

Okay, so here we have my laptop and I'll go ahead and launch key note for us here and what I'm going to do at this point, I'm going to go ahead and create a new document just so we can start fresh and we can see what our options are here with this. So as I mentioned before, this is our theme pickers, so this is where we can choose the thing that we want to work with and in this case, because we're working with the wide screen display, I'm going to choose a widescreen theme, and this is important to make this decision up front if we know that we're going to be working with maybe older technology on the display side of things, we want to make sure to match the theme to that display, so since in this case we're working with a wide screen display, we're going to go ahead and choose a widescreen team for that one of my favorite ones is the showroom theme that's, it's a nice and clean design, but you can see that there's a lot of different themes that we can choose from, and some are a littl...

e more scrapbook ease some are a little more geared towards photographers, um, and so we have lots of options to choose from, so I'm actually going to go ahead and choose this improv theme so we'll go ahead and choose that and open a new document here it's going to zoom out a little bit you can see that full slide and so at this point we're presented with the user interface of key note there are typically four sections of this application the first section is the tool bar that we confined at the top here and that's where a lot of the action happens in terms of adding shapes and adding content to our slides on the right hand side this is our editing pain this is where we make changes to our formatting where we where we change animations where we can ad slight transitions things like that that those air really the properties of the objects that were adjusting on the left hand side by default we have this view where we can see a quick a quick summary of this lies that we have that are building this slide deck so this is our sort of a thumbnail view and then in the middle here is where all of our content lives. This is what I consider to be our canvas just like an artist has a canvas this is my keynote canvas this is where I make the magic happen so up on the toolbar here the toolbars broken into really three main sections on the left hand side this is where we change the view of what we're looking at so you can see here that there's a view button and under that view button we have lots of different options of how we convey ur slide deck so these air actually really good too to keep in mind as you're working with your slide deck specifically the one that I like to work in when I'm not working in this navigator view which is where we are now where we have the thumbnails on the side and the canvas on the right the light table of you is a really good view to use when you're working with moving slides around so this allows you to essentially take all of your slides and throw them on a table and just kind of makes him around right? So if we want to take slide fifteen and moving up to slide three we just drag and drop and it's a nice air we can see all of her slides in one view of course he can move slides around in the navigator view as well but it's if you're working with a lot of slides it's a little bit easier in that table if you are in the light table view another view is the slide on lease if you want to shut out everything else and just focus on your slide that would be an option for looking at just the slide so you kind of hide all of that other noise that's around you this one down here the edit master slides were going to get into masters a little bit later in the class but this is where we can actually get into that at master slide piece down at the bottom we've got a few more options to consider when building our slides one option is the show find and replace features so this is a really nice feature that if you are if you were looking for a specific string of text in your slide in your slide deck and you want to replace that with maybe something different maybe you've built a complex slide deck for a client torre project and you have another client that's looking for something very similar and you've branded that slide deck for that specific company maybe abc incorporated then you can come in here and look for every instance of abc incorporated and automatically change that to x y z incorporated just to make that really easy to do a finding a replace ruler's air very good to keep in mind because it allows you to really place things in precise locations and kind of keeps you oriented on your slide with location of objects and then your comments are I consider comments to be like sticky notes for your slide deck in this case where normally with a sticky note you're right and note down you kind of stick it on your screen or stick it on your refrigerator this is more for keeping track of different thoughts you have with regards to building the slide, for example maybe want tio maybe add some audio to a specific slide, but you're not quite sure, so what I could do is add a note to that slide and say, you know, next time let's look, adding an audio clip to this slide to accentuate what it is we're trying to communicate in the slide. So this is where we can show and hide those notes. We also have an option here to zoom the slides. Now this option gives us the ability to zoom to us a specific percentage twenty five percent, fifty percent of something predefined. Another way to zoom through your slides is simply on your track pad to use your fingers to pinch in zoom so that's that's the way that I really navigate through my slides and getting into the detail. It's just a pinch in zoom because it's quick and easy, your fingers are already usually on the track pad, so it's just a quick way to kind of move around your slides and in the last button on this section is to add a slide. This is where we can add additional slides to our slide deck, so you're going to be really familiar with that button is you're building out your slide decks. Okay, the center section of the tool bar is more of our action section, so this is where we can actually start to add source slides so we can add a table we can add a text box we can add, uh, shapes and lines and arrows and things like that we can add media at this point where when you click on the media button that will actually open up your photos library and read that photos library so I, for example, use my photos library quite heavily for organizing and managing all my photos, you know, family vacations and business trips and client engagements and things like that. So if you're already using photos to manage your photos, this is an easy way to just pull that library up drag and drop a picture in and you're done. You can, of course, at a picture and manually, which is literally just dragging and dropping an image onto a slide, so you have a few options of getting slides into your slide on the right hand side of the tool bar. This is where a lot of the formatting happens not just formatting of properties on objects but also animations and slight transitions, a lot of emotion things that we're gonna be talking about in this class um and it's also adjusting the properties on your document itself, so if we look at that this is where we can actually. So first of all, when we created a new document, we chose the theme, right? So in this case, we chose this thing, maybe we feel like halfway through the development of the slide deck, we want to change themes, not a big deal it's a piece of cake to do that and that's actually done right here in the document properties window, and we can do that just by clicking on the change theme button, and it brings up that same familiar window that we saw when we created the document initially, and we can come in here and say, you know, let's do the renaissance theme, we'll choose that and automatically changes all of the slides in our slide deck, so when you're using themes it's really, really easy if you stick with the theme design to change themes and kind of mixed things up in a way that's, that's really simple for you, there's some other settings in here that that will go into a little bit later in the class, but I wantto just bring them up right now, one of which is there's an option to automatically play a slide show when you open the file, so this is really good for, like a kiosk mode where you just want to open the file and have it play automatically there are options toe loop, a slide show and some other specific options for the document. The one that I really wanted to point out though is the slide show are sort of the slide size at the bottom, so initially we chose the widescreen ratio let's say that we we were told that we're going to give a presentation on a wide screen display like this and then come to find out last minute they changed it up on us and they're going to use an older display first of all that's that's not a good thing, right? Because we want to have all the information ahead of time to prepare well for this, but in the event that that does happen, we can come in here and simply change that to more of a standard for three ratio design now if you've designed it using a wide aspect ratio, your text is going to be wide, your image is there going to be spread out, so if you do that just before one that you'll have to do some editing on your slides just to make sure that things fit appropriately on the slides before you go alive. Ok, so let's talk a little bit about actually I'm sorry there's one more thing there's one more thing that I wanted to cover on the user interface that is going to help you guys to really navigate around the system and that is so we've gone through the tool bar, but there's a way to customize that toolbar, too, so if there are buttons that maybe you don't use very often or their buttons that you want to use more often, we can customize the tool bar to fit exactly what your needs are and to do that if we go to view on the menu bar and then down to customize toolbar, that will bring up this window right here, and this same the same window is available the same features available across all I work applications, both pages and numbers as well. And the idea behind this is it really allows you to customize your experience, to help you, to get the most out of using the application, and really, it comes down to your productivity and making things quicker and simpler for you. But let's say, for example, that we don't use the table, but very often so we can just drag and drop that off and with a puff of smoke, that button is now gone. If we use, for example, the instant alfa a lot, which I tend to use quite a bit, then we can drag that, but not their another common button might be the adjust image button, so we can place that up there, and now we've customized it in a way that that works better for me, and so at this point, we can just click the done button and be done. If you want to go back and just reset the tool bar back to the factory settings, we can just take this tool bar at the bottom here, drag and drop that up and it's back to our default settings. Ok, let's, go ahead and exit out of that now. All right, there's a couple of things that I wanted to show you with regards to organizing your slides and really the idea behind this is making it easier for you to work with your slides as you build your slides out slide dex can be very long, very lengthy, very complicated and usually slides were broken into sections, so for example, we might have an introduction section where we go into a couple of other slides we could have another section that talks about a serious of products or some research and development that goes into another series of slides. So what I'm going to do here, let's, go ahead and add a few more slides here, and I'm just going to do this quickly, and we're not going to choose anything specific, so I'm just adding a series of slides here, so we have our introductory titles slide, and then maybe the second slide is on product development. Well go ahead and and set that there and then maybe the next couple of slides are actually talking about product development so one way that we could organize or slides in a way that makes sense to us in working with those slides is we can invent those slides in so that it feels like they're all kind of encapsulated into that same section so the way that we do that is we select the slide that we want to end it and we hit the tab button okay? And what that does is it gives you a visual indicator that we're now working within that product development piece of the slide deck now this doesn't seem like a big deal but we're working with large slide dex it could be a really big deal in terms of keeping your your your thoughts and your notes organized so we'll do that for a second slide just you can see what that looks like and maybe if you have a slide underneath of that that's part of that section we can invent that slide and then in debt one more time and now we're kind of capturing that as its own section so that does two things one is it gives you a visual indicator that you're not organizing these into groups but the second thing that it does let me zoom in here so you can see this is it gives you a little expansion triangle that you can now collapse so let's say, for example, we're not working on the product development piece of our slide deck right now, so let's go ahead and close that up and everything underneath of that now rolls up into one single slide so again, if you're working with a slide deck that's one hundred slides long like the presentation that I was showing earlier, you can really shrink things up and make it more manageable to work with and that'll save you a lot of time and hassle and working with your slides. We can also use that to expand that out and we can we can close subsections as well so we can organize that house one it's a great way to display our slides going back to the view let's go ahead and just show you that yeah let's say that you decide that a particular slide should not be in the product development section how do you undo the tapping right? The subject? Great question. Yes oh to undo a tab, highlight the slide that you want to move back out and hold down shift while you hit tab that will bring it back one layer and if we do it again that will bring it back out another layer and it on lee do you only have those to let two levels or can you go infinitely deep? So we can go I don't know what the word indefinitely but within reason yeah, you can see here that right now I've got one, two, three four different layers that we're working with I've not seen a slide deck that's gone beyond you know, three, four or even five really that's sort of the max, but if you're interested we can you know let's just keep tapping so now we've got one, two, three, four, five and let's do that again now we've got six so it's it's pretty extensive as faras in nineteen are slides and really packaging that up, so if we switch our view here now toe light table you can see now with the light table looks like now we're in the light table view we're not going to see all those indentations of the groups and that's ok, because that's not the purpose of the light table but at this point we can now take some of these slides and easily moved them around to different sections of our slide deck so that that's like that light table of you is a is a really nice view to use when when really organizing your thoughts I know a lot of people when they develop their slides, what they do is they just throw a lot of their thoughts on the slides and not really think about the flow of there slide presentation and then after the fact, once they get all their ideas out on the table, then they'll go into the light table view and start to organize them into a good work flow. Okay, one thing I wanted to show you here, so that's organizing your slides, let's talk just for a second about the slide master. So a slide master is the template that we start with. So in this case, we the slide master that we're working with is pre defined by apple. They have designed this renaissance slide master to look a certain way we can actually go in and modify that slide master to adapted to our needs, or we can create a completely new slide master just for our needs. One example of why you'd want to do that is maybe you have a business that you your heavy on the branding side of things and you do a lot of presentations you could actually re brand or create your own slide master to match that branding and really emphasize what your business is doing. So in this case, what I want to do is I'm just going to take this existing theme, and I'm going to add my logo to it so pretty simple, so to get into the slide master, what I will do is go into, uh, let's, see view and edit master slides so this will bring up our slide master of you know, one thing that I want to make sure we understand here is there's not just one slide master for a theme there is a slide master for every type of slide that we can add to a theme so for example in this particular theme we have one, two, three, four five six seven about twelve or fourteen different slide masters that we can choose from. So you notice before that let's hit done just to put things into perspective if we add a new slide these are the types of slides we can add these are all of the slide masters so for example there's one that has an image with a little bit of text below there's another one with just an image full screen there's another one that's just blank so these are all different slide masters that go into building this theme so if we go back into view and then edit master slides now we can see how all of this kind of correlates with each other. So for example on the blank slide let's zoom out a little bit. So this is our blank slide mastermind a move that over a little bit and I'm going to take my logo and let's just shrink that up here and let's put it in the bottom left hand corner and will click done and what that's going to do now is when we added these slide and we want to choose that particular master slide is going to automatically imbed our logo into that slide now a tw this point with that logo embedded on that slide, we can't move that logo around that's locked into place, so whatever elements we put on the master slides are embedded and they you can't change them in the slide design view, you can go back into the slide master view and adjust things there so for example, is got a weird square shape around that, so we want to modify that, so we'll go back into view and we'll go back into edit master slides will select that and we'll change this teo no border that looks a lot better will click on done. We go back to our slides and notice that that change has been made. Now one of the really cool things about master slides is that whatever change we make affects every slide equally across the slide deck, the entire slide deck that's using that master slide. So if I used this particular master slide and I added fifty more slides to my slide deck and I go back into the master slide and I change one thing on that automatically changes everything else across the slide deck, does that make sense? Okay that's, a pretty powerful tool and I know that's fairly typical across all presentation tools, but I don't think enough people really take advantage of of something like a slide master. Now, when it comes to branding your own business, this is an extremely powerful tool, because it allows you to easily create these themes of your own that you could distribute out to your sales force, your administrative group, your hr group, whatever it really allows you to help brand your business. One recommendation that I would have if you're going to create your own theme, what I typically like to do is create a new one and let's, go ahead and say, wide aspect ratio, I always start with the white because the white is the least amount of changes to really bring everything back to a raw state, which I can then build from. So in this example, I will choose the white and let's go into the master slides here and let's see what that looks like. So we've got a few in there, you know? A lot of that stuff is just noise, and I'm not going use a lot of that, so I will go ahead and select some of these master slides and just delete them, so we don't need a lot of these in fact, you know, we really just need two we just need the title slide and a blank slide at this point we can at her own background to it we can add our logo we can add text we can add whatever elements we feel we need for this particular master slide and then save that out of their own theme and distribute that out one really really cool thing about slide masters is not only can you include static images but you can also include animations in there as well so maybe you have something that's part of your branding is you have your logo on the bottom right hand corner of the kind of rotates in on every slide you can set that animation and it will rotate in at the same time that you're slide builds in so that's really cool as well all right curious where do you think the balance lies between when it's useful to create masters versus just doing it individually I'm going to slide you know it seems like at a certain point you are making a long enough side deck that it's like it really should be standardizing should be using masters do you recommend that people use masters every single time they created kino or is it just once it gets to a certain size um I would suggest so every slide is different of course I would suggest for maybe some elements that makes sense tio edit a master slide and make certain elements part of the entire slide deck for example in the slide show that I was showing before we we got into the application you'll notice that there was a line that kind of came in from the side and a bar at the top and then within that bar there were some buttons that kind of dropped down those buttons of course can't be part of well I guess technically it could be part of the master slide that I could use just for that section um it's really personal preference and if you're going to use a slide a lot I definitely recommend at least exploring master slides and again the really powerful thing with that is not just the upfront preparation side of things but if you do a big long slide deck and you want to make one change and I've run into this before where I make one change to something and I have to copy and paste and paste and paste and paste on pace and pace all the way through and that it's a pain so master slides is one of those things and keynote that I would really recommend trying to master because once you really understand what they what they can do for you and your productivity and how they work it's going to save you a lot of time down the road so I would encourage you to really master that and a master slud master the master slide absolutely but it's a lot of those personal preferences well and some people like to copy and paste in payson based kind of recommend against it where's I think he's on the keyboard ok, one more thing that I wanted to show you here with the user interface are alignment guides so I had I know what alignment guides are and another some of the other I work classes as part of this we we looked at alignment guys and how they work I learned something new just recently they got me really even mohr excited about alignment guides then I was before and rust knows that I get really excited about alignment guides difficult to be more excited than you already it's sort of wood yes, yes so I'm just going to let me review what alignment guides are just briefly so let's I'm going to go ahead and close this file out and just to make things simple I'll bring this image back in to our presentation let's shrink that up a little bit so alignment guides are an easy and quick and dead simple way to make sure your images are in the spot that you want them to be. For example, I've got a logo here that I want to make absolutely center on my slide, so what I will do is kind of get it close to the middle here oh, and look at that so we've got so now it looks like we're snapped in vertically now we want to snap in horizontally and we can see now that this this image is exactly center on this light, okay, we can also if we have it all sent her a little bit, we can also a line or snapped these images next to each other. So if we wanted to align these centered, we can see that these images air centered to each other because the blue the blue line is now going between just those two images instead of the full width of the slide. So that's the difference between the two lines? But one thing I realized yesterday is that you can actually create your own alignment guide wherever you want on your slide, it doesn't have to be right in the middle in either direction or with another object. So for example, let's, go ahead and turn on our ruler because we'll need that for this. We'll go to view and then show rulers, so maybe I want to snap it up in the in the corner here somewhere and I want to use a rule of thirds rule and I want to snap it somewhere in that area it's going delete this one so I want to snap this somewhere right around here so what I will do is take my ruler here on the side and if I want to snap it horizontally I want to start on the ruler on the left side that makes sense so you'll see here I've got my mouse on the left hand ruler and I'm going to click and hold my mouse and drag it over and let's say I wanted to snap right there that's about a third of the way across and I'll let go okay that's going to leave that blue alignment guide there in place now if I take my image and move it across it's now snapping to that alignment get grid or that alignment guide ok that's pretty cool and then I can create another one maybe that goes horizontally from the top ruler bring it down I want to snap it right there so now you can snap that to exactly that spot every time now what's really cool about that is you can actually create your own alignment guides in master slides so if you have a master slide and you want to always snap something but a different object because with the slide master you can have the same object but you can create a lineman guides for a slide master that is now embedded in every single slide that's using that particular master slide so if you always want to put an object at this point you can you can snap it to that custom alignment guide that's wild it's. Just a simple little thing, but it really is very cool. Do you agree? Ruses that really cool? I actually really like it. Can you have multiple horizontal or vertical guides on the same slide? I love your questions, russ. Absolutely. Yes. So if we want maybe another one on the other side on the other third, we do the same thing, just dragged that over so we can have a cz many whips. As many as we want. Let's, go and shrink that down. We can have as many alignment guys as we want. Now it gets a little bit crazy. You know, if you have, yeah, you're not sure if you're snapping it this one or that one or, you know, but, yeah, you can have as many vertically and horizontally as you want. And again, if we just added these two, this slide, it only affects this slide. But if we added to the master slide, it affects every slide that uses that particular master slide. Very cool stuff.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Keyboard Shortcuts for Keynote®
Allgaier Blue Keynote® Template

Bonus Video: Apple iWork User Interfaces

iWork Interface.mp4

Bonus Video: What is Apple iWork?

What is iWork.mp4

Bonus Video: Why Use Apple iWork?

Why Use iWork.mp4

Ratings and Reviews

Kris Lattimore
 

Never worked with Keynote before and this class very clearly sets it all up, explains and examples the larger bits as well as encourages exploring more detail as well. The tie-in to video at the end was surprising and very interesting. Thanks!

Student Work

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