Waiting for me to bag-out powerpoint aren’t you? Not today. I was a Windows user for more than a decade before my conversion. I produced many high quality presentations with Powerpoint and as I was brought up to believe that its a poor tradesperson who blames his tools I’ll give fare dues to PPT. Microsoft’s presentation software has been around longer than Apple’s and it bristles, in a dull chrome-plated plastic kind of way, with features that are in some cases sadly and in others thankfully absent from Keynote. One of the features I’ve missed, which was an integral part of my presentation creation workflow, is the ability to create a presentation outline in a word processor application and import it into Powerpoint.

Being able to create outlines away from the presentation tool allows you to focus on dialogue: a bit like writing a screen play. It’s also a great way to cheat if your running late with your presentation or working from someone else’s document, because you can markup an existing document and then quickly produce a presentation from it.

Thankfully, it is possible to do this in Keynote but its not very apparent how. I’m not sure how long this feature has existed, some blog posts suggest it was only introduced in the latest version (Keynote ’09 – Version 5) but given the secluded nature of this feature it may have been around longer. Anyway, here’s how to create outlines for Keynote in Pages and, believe it or not, TextEdit.

Lets look at the quick-and-dirty way to do this with Pages first. Open Pages and select the Harvard Outline template from the template chooser. Some blog posts suggest you can use any of the outline templates but I’ve done some experiments and found that the only one that works reliable (tell you why later) is the Harvard one. If you just want to see how this works for now don’t bother changing the text otherwise replace the text in the template with the text of your presentation.  Keep in mind how the structure of the outline will render in Keynote: first / root level headings become page titles, second level headings become first level bulleted lists, third level headings become second level sub lists and so on. The Harvard Outline template has nine heading levels but using any more then three is impractical. Ignore the numbering of the lists in the outline, they will not appear in the presentation. Select all the text in your pages document and copy it.

• File > New from Template Chooser…

Select the Harvard Outline Template

Open Keynote and select a template. Don’t paste anything yet though. Open the outline view (View > Outline) and select the slide icon next to the number 1 which represents the first page of the presentation. Wait for it … get your thumb off the command key. Go to the edit menu and select Paste and Match Style. That’s all there is to it.

• File > New from Theme Chooser…
• Select a theme
• View > Outline
• Select the slide icon nect to the number 1

Select the slide icon next to the number 1 in the Keynote outline view

• Edit > Paste and Match Style

The imported outline as it apperas in Keynote

Why does it work? Better still: Why doesn’t it work with the other outline templates? In the Harvard Outline template each heading level has a corresponding indent level. If you open the Text inspector and select the list tab you can see the indent level for each heading level as you select them. This stays consistent when you edit content in this template. You can select list items and hit tab to increase the indentation or shift+tab to decrease it and the indent level will follow suit. This however is not the case in the other outline templates: indentation of the content increases and decreases but the indent level doesn’t.

Once we appreciate that the indent level is the prompt for Keynote to create a new slide or bulleted list we can use this to markup our own documents for use as a presentation out line or to create our own presentation outline template. I’ve created a very simple one for you to try. The shear simplicity of the indent level being the key to this and my experience with Powerpoint which uses a similar technique and can import a range of document types as outlines got me thinking that we might be able to use other applications to create outlines. A few experiments later and it became obvious that it is possible to create outlines simply and quickly in TextEdit. The procedure to do so is as follows.

Create a new RTF document in TextEdit.* You know your editing rich text in TextEdit when you see the styles, alignment, etc., controls in the button bar.

Type out some slide titles and bullet points each one on a single line like the example here.

Unformattted outline in TextEdit

Format all the bullet point and sub-bullet point text into bulleted lists by selecting one of the list styles from the lists drop-down.

The TextEdit outline as a list

Indent all the list items one level deep by selecting them and hitting the tab key once.

FYI You can make multiple selections by holding down the command key whilst selecting with the mouse.

Select the sub-bullet list items and indent them one more time.

Finished outline in TextEdit

Select all the text and then follow the steps above to create a new Keynote presentation and paste the text into its outline.

The outline from TextEdit as it appears in Keynote

*This is usually the default for TextEdit, much to my annoyance. Many Mac users assume from the name that its a plan text editor when it is both a basic rich-text editor (RTF – rich text format) and a plan text editor but it creates rich text by default.

Les Posen’s “Presentation Magic” seminar is full of useful, common sense, tips for presenting with “Slideware”. A devote of Apples Keynote software, Les shows participants how not to kill with “PowerPoint” based on his knowledge, as a psychologist, of how we learn. There were several good take-homes from his presentation but I’ll limit myself to just one or two. The first of these sits well with my own philosophy that (depending on your audience) presentations should be entertaining. Show people what you are on about using appropriate images, video, audio etc.  If the audience wants to read about something they’ll buy a book, not attend a seminar. The other very important point Les made, one that I learned from studying instructional design, is not to split the audiences attention – e.g. If you have a large slab of text on the screen and you are talking about it, this will split the audience’s attention as some will be listening whilst others  reading.

Having worried over presentations in the past, especially whether I’ve included all the pertinent information or not, Les’ observation that no one else, besides you, knows what should/shouldn’t be in your presentation was a minor revelation. In future if I have to skip a slide or two due to time constraints or I don’t think I’ve manged to get all the information in and the half our presentation is looking more like a four day workshop I’m going to relax and start happily slashing and burning.

If I had anything negative to say about Les’ presentation it would be that he transgressed one of my own personal bug-bares, which is that the design of his slides was occasionally  inconsistent (a mixture of templates). For me this hurt his message a little.

Louise Mahler’s “Vocal Intelligence” presentation focuses on the human element of a presentation, i.e. you the presenter. Her knowledge of the physics of presenting; posture, breathing, eye movement/contact, body language etc. gleaned from her studies and alternate career as an opera singer, is invaluable. Next time I present I’ll take with me her various techniques for breathing/posture which can help to overcome the butterflys we all get in front of an audience. Suggestions for eye contact such as “one thought, one person” and the eternal problem of where to put ones hands when “at rest”, in front of yourself with one hand clasping the other wrist (not your crotch), will definitely come in handy .

Like many people I’m uncomfortable with audience participation so I found this aspect of Louise’s workshop confronting but if I’m going to put myself in front of an audience to present I should really just get over this.

All in all the only real downside to the event was that it was only a half day. I’m sure that Les and Louise could easily have done a half day each and still have more useful knowledge to impart.

N.B. The same can apply to other Mac apps. So from now on I’m going to leave them in their default folder and if I want to be able to launch them from, say the Applications folder, I’m going to use sim-links.