iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Chapter 13. 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 iWork’s colorful palette of layout objects: pictures, shapes, text boxes, tables, charts, and movies—all the same elements that you use in Pages for page layout and in Numbers for designing multimedia reports.

In fact, designing slides in Keynote is practically identical to designing documents in the other iWork programs. You use the very same tools, techniques, toolbar icons, and inspector windows to create and manipulate your design elements. This tight integration of tools is good news, since it means that you don’t really have to learn three different programs: Once you’ve mastered layout in one iWork application, you’ve mastered it in all of them. There are minor changes from program to program, but the fundamentals remain the same.

This chapter spares your patience (and quite a few trees) by not rehashing every last detail already explained in Chapter 7’s exploration of the layout tools in Pages. You’ll still learn how to fill your Keynote slides with text boxes, pictures, tables, charts, and the rest, but in cases of overlap, the chapter frequently points ...