Apple's Keynote 3 Impresses

- 2006.08.04

Last Friday, I proudly walked into the Apple Store near my home and purchased a shiny new MacBook. To my pleasure, a trial version of iWork 06 was included (I thought you only received the trials through online purchases, remember, this is my first time buying a Mac.)

Upon arriving home and finishing all the registration, I opened up iWork 06 and started playing around with Keynote 3.

Keynote 3 vs. PowerPoint 2004

At first glance, I was a little confused. After all, every school project requires PowerPoint. After a while you get kinda used to it.

Searching around for the effects and transitions, I discovered what you really can do with Keynote. Something as simple as showing and hiding the ruler or adding media with just a few clicks makes all the difference in the world.

Even the littlest of touches can make an impact. Take the Gradient option under Background: You have the option to rotate the gradient instead of being forced to pick one. It's really the little touches that improve the software.

PowerPoint isn't a bad tool, and this isn't meant to be a slam fest on anything non-Apple. There is one thing I miss, and that's the ability to right click and create effects instead of having to go through the Inspector.

Another thing is I'm not used to all the buttons on top such as: Media, Inspector, Colors etc. But all in all, each has their advantages and disadvantages.

Other Keynote Users

A couple of years ago (when I was in 8th grade), my humanities teacher, Mrs. Fitz, had (and still has) a husband who works for Apple. Throughout the year we talked about Apple things, especially the two B&W Power Macs she had brought in loaded with OS X (10.3, I believe).

One day she was telling me how the staff would ask her to make "another one of those PowerPoints" and how she would get upset that people couldn't tell she hadn't used PowerPoint.

This past year I had a teacher who grew up on Macs - to the point where he didn't know how to use the school's Dell laptops. Throughout the semester-long class, he would make very nice presentations in Keynote that simple flowed. They had simplicity to them, something that can be overdone in PowerPoint.

A Few More Thoughts

Making presentations for school or work can be a drag - finding the right backgrounds, pictures, and fonts - and half the time it is screwed up somehow with over-stretched pictures or contrasting colors that simply hurt. (Take bright red and lime green, for example. Trust me, it isn't the prettiest thing to look at for 20 slides.)

Keynote is easy to use and quick to learn. That makes working with it a lot easier.

Keynote 3, it simply works.

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