This will not be your usual "Living With" column where someone who has reviewed a product before will follow-up with some further real-world experiences of up to a year later. For starters, we never did a "Hands On" for Keynote, at least not in that column form, and as far as a quick search can tell we've never done a formal review. We've just lived with it for many years -- 13, as it turns out -- and it is so much part and parcel of the way we do presentations (and we do a lot of them) that it is a bit like running reviews of your furniture.
We have covered Keynote in other ways, of course -- reporting on new versions, offering Pointers on
how to get more out of it, tips for using the program on your
Apple Watch and
on iCloud, and more. We even did a Hands On for arch-rival and forerunner
PowerPoint 2016, but not Keynote -- even when it got a pretty radical makeover as part of the updating of the entire suite formerly known as iWork for OS X and iOS in 2013. So this will not be the usual update on a previous review that notes either increased admiration or reduced esteem after so long working with it; this will be a full-on love letter.
Simply put, Keynote is the best all-around presentation program around. There are others that are more powerful, like PowerPoint, and flashier, like
FotoMagico, both of which are well worth checking out, and which may suit your needs more than Keynote, but nonetheless Keynote still remains -- as it has been from nearly day one -- the general-purpose, best all-around tool for presenting slides on a Mac or iOS device. I have been using it for classes and other presentations for more than 10 years now, and before it (and occasionally since) I used PowerPoint and others. So I've tried the rest, and generally stick with the best.
What makes Keynote so good?
Considering that its roots come from
Concurrence -- a program Apple co-founder Steve Jobs used for keynote presentations before Keynote existed, and which was originally written for OpenStep/NeXTStep -- Keynote's greatest strength and the main factor that makes it better for most users than PowerPoint is, simply put, the home field advantage. It's a Mac program, written for the Mac (later for iOS as well), and takes full advantage of current Mac features and design thinking (the latter of which caused some brief consternation, but that storm seems to have passed).
Keynote 5, with the awful Inspector palette
Originally, Keynote was a simplified, focused cousin to PowerPoint that had been designed by people who had taste, and made over to feature beautifully-designed templates, tasteful styles and font options -- and the features that really won me over, the ones that made me put PowerPoint aside because at the time it didn't have it: automatic guides and centering, position-aware copy and paste, and (finally!) a true dissolve transition (halleleujah, no more blocky Atari-style PowerPoint "dissolve"). You still see that joke of a dissolve on PowerPoint slideshows today, and its just a flashback to the 90s for me every time.
I confess now, however, that I was never a big fan of the AppleWorks-meets-Macromedia "inspector" that previous versions of Keynote used. I always felt it was a lot of extra clicking to shift around the area of controls that I needed, and the Inspector would hide behind things on my then-crowded screen. That said, the drag-and-drop nature of handling images and media and the aforementioned auto-guides ensured I would be a fan. When a later update brought in the ability to build basic animations and moving transitions, which again was painless compared to other programs at the time, it kicked the level of the presentations up a notch.
Keynote 6 with a contextual sidebar
From the first time I started regularly using Keynote for presentations, you could tell immediately if people were expected YAPPPP -- yet another pointless PowerPoint presentation -- with Times and Helvetica fonts, 50 types of transitions, and deathly dull backgrounds. This leads me to an important tip I learned early on that I will gladly pass on to slideshow presenters everywhere:
your audience can read. Don't repeat the text you put on the slide, expound on it and supplement it instead. Occasionally reiterating a point verbatim from a bullet point on a slide is one thing, reading them the full text of an overly wordy slide is alienating and dull. Don't do it.
One last little "trick" -- you can, as I often do, use one completed presentation to start a newer one, but it's important that you remember one important thing: duplicate. Unlike most other programs you use, Keynote features auto-saving, and will faithfully and automatically and without telling you change the saved version of your old presentation as you make changes to it to make it into a new one (you can change this in settings, but you'll forget -- as I have for at least three years running).
Luckily, you can always revert back to the "original" version you opened, but to avoid any accidental overwriting of your previous work (assuming you want to save it), get in the habit of doing this: open the old presentation you want to use as a basis for a new one, choose "duplicate" from the file menu, and a second version will open. Click on the title bar, and change the title to what the new one should be called. Now you can close the "old" one, and start altering the new one, safe in the knowledge that you're not destroying old work as you go.
Leveling up to iOS and 64-bit
In late 2013, Apple decided that it needed to radically restructure its entire suite of what used to be called the iWork apps -- Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. The reasons were incredibly solid -- the app needed to be able to run as 64-bit applications, written to modern specifications and able to leverage newer Mac technologies now and in the future, and Apple decided that it also needed a version for iOS and a web-based version that was as similar as possible to the desktop version.
This was, and remains, a very good idea -- but as often happens, Apple couldn't do this kind of massive renovation on the apps
and keep all the features that had been added to Keynote over the previous five versions. Thus, for just under a year, the iWork apps were
missing some features -- not the major ones, but lots of little ones that had lots of fans -- most of which have been slowly put back over the course of several updates. While some will disagree with me, at this point I think Keynote is better than the pre-makeover version (which still runs, incidentally, and wasn't removed by Apple if you already had it) in nearly all ways, particularly in terms of platform flexibility and in terms of visual design, but there are some features that can't be duplicated on mobile or cloud platforms, and thus they are not (yet?) there.
Ridiculously easy to generate charts, graphs
For my use, this is what I like to call "Keynote for high-definition." It's not only built to look great on Retina screens, but it's built to do slideshows that live in the digital, HDTV, and LED projector era. The 640x480 slideshow is dead; you need to build for 720p (at least) if not 1080p; it's not that the previous versions of Keynote
couldn't handle HD, it was just trickier to find assets that really looks good in high-resolution. Nowadays, I pluck HD videos off of YouTube (or shoot them on my iPhone or desktop) and simply drop them into an empty slide: perfectly centered, sure to play, locally stored -- everything PowerPoint has previously, at one time or another, failed on me with.
Having moved the furniture and controls around a bit, Keynote 6 has steadily improved and restored features -- the current Mac version is now 6.6.1 -- and is now well-matched on iOS, meaning I can edit or create slideshows on my iPad or even, in a pinch, on the iPhone as well as the Mac -- and the iCloud version keeps pace with all of them, giving me both a backup site to secure my presentations in case I need to pull down another copy, and a place where I can make a last-minute change on even a PC, since all I need to run Keynote outside my own devices is a web browser.
In addition, the iOS version of Keynote can run a slideshow directly to an HDTV or AirPlay-compatible device (like an Apple TV) using AirPlay, and the iOS app can also double as a Wi-Fi remote control for Keynote running on your Mac -- which in my case means I can move around freely and change slides from anywhere in the room, rather than just by line-of-sight. Given the number of Wi-Fi networks I connect to to do slideshows, the reliability of that software is remarkable (though I'd be lying if I said I never had to occasionally reconnect the iOS remote function to the Mac I want to run with it).
Using iOS Keynote to control your Mac's Keynote
With an Apple TV and a projector or HDTV, I don't even need to bring the Mac -- the slideshow I saved on iCloud can be pulled up on my iPhone, which AirPlays it over to the Apple TV connected to the projector or to the HDTV, depending on the size of the group. An entire slideshow, with animations, videos, and web links that gracefully open in Safari -- running entirely off the iPhone, and in some cases created there. It's a real "living in the future" moment.
In my presentations, I often drop out of the slideshow to do a live demo of the program or service or site I'm talking about, and the fact that I can simply hit command-h on the Mac keyboard (or double-click the home button on iOS devices, which will let me choose another app, or slide one in using Slide Over or Split View ...) makes it easy to switch back and forth between the slideshow and the demo bits without fear, and if by chance I find that I can't connect my Mac or iOS device because the host site insists on using PCs, no worries: I'll pull it up from iCloud.com and run it from there, still beating the pants off of their clumsily-designed "traditional" slideshows, mostly drawn from templates they've been using for two decades.
Plugging the day job in a slideshow
Keynote makes it easier to create visually better slideshows, show them based off mobile or desktop devices, and use those slideshows in conjunction with the most gorgeous-looking OS to run demos on -- the ones from Apple. It's as reliable as your dog getting excited when you come home, its almost as much fun to create the slideshows as it is to present them, and you can even buy a little laser pointer to attach to your iPhone to use to point at things. Next, I'm going to try running my next presentation entirely off my Apple Watch -- this
is living in the future.
-- Charles Martin
The iOS versions of Keynote do have a laser pointer feature, and it's fantastic, together with the pencils you can use to scribble on your slides (see here: 
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