Laying Out Your Slides
The toughest part of preparing a presentation is really just figuring out what you’re going to say. Once you’ve got that behind you and poured a rough text outline into Keynote, everything that follows is the fun part, the visual candy. This is the design phase, where you craft eye-catching slides to illuminate your presentation’s key points. You’ll compose your slideshow masterpiece with Keynote’s colorful palette of layout objects: pictures, shapes, text boxes, tables, charts, and movies. You use toolbar icons and inspector windows to create and manipulate your design elements.
Before getting into all that good stuff, though, take a quick diversion into the details of a good hygiene regimen when creating a new slideshow.
Setting Up the Keynote Document
Before you can start creating slides, you first have to create a Keynote document: the container that becomes your virtual slide tray for the presentation. To do so, launch Keynote (or, if it’s already running, choose File➝New) to open the Theme Chooser. Select a theme and a slide size, and then click Choose (see “Themes = Templates”).
From there, it’s a good idea to do some initial housekeeping to establish exactly how you’d like Keynote to present your slideshow, setting the ground rules for how you and your audience will interact with it. The Document Inspector is the place where you take care of these preliminaries. Click the Inspector button in the toolbar to call forth the Inspector window, and click ...
