[yellowdog]

Where does Keynote keep its themes? If I wanted to have some Powerpoint themes be shown on my theme selection gallery is there some easy way to do that?

[walrusjb]

The built-in themes are inside the App itself. If you want to add your own themes, etc. you can do it in one of 2 places for it to show up in the selector:

For all users of the machine:
[hard drive]/Library/Application Support/Keynote/Themes (create the themes folder if it doesn't exist)

For just one user, same localle within the user's Home directory (i.e. hard drive/users/username/library/application support/ etc.)

You'll also need to convert the themes in this case to Keynote's theme format (save Theme from file menu), though i haven't tried this with the existing PPT themes, so I have no idea what you'll end up with.

[edit to better specify how to save theme from Keynote]

[yellowdog]

Originally posted by walrusjb:
For just one user, same localle within the user's Home directory (i.e. hard drive/users/username/library/application support/ etc.)

You'll also need to convert the themes in this case to Keynote's theme format (save Theme from file menu), though i haven't tried this with the existing PPT themes, so I have no idea what you'll end up with.

[edit to better specify how to save theme from Keynote]

Thanks for the tip! I tried it with a few of the Mactopia site's new Powerpoint themes. It does work, but the only slide masters that show up are for Titles & Bullets and Titles & Subtitle. If I open them in Powerpoint I get to select all the master slide options. I'll keep playing around with it, but it is nice to be able to try out some new themes.

[walrusjb]

If there are additional masters that aren't coming over, you may want to try creating a presentation with each of the masters in use in PowerPoint... save that presentation and import it into Keynote... then Save Theme from there.

**Most** PowerPoint templates consist of just a couple of masters (Title Slide + Text Slide, possibly a Print (Notes) Slide) so you may not get more than that... but if you're comfortable working with masters it's pretty easy to make a full "Apple Set" (the 11 default masters) from just about any background, etc. - biggest difference will be the Photo cut-outs and Charts (which are defined in the XML file for each presentation/theme).

If you want to try out more Themes for Keynote that have been developed specifically for it (it seems a bit of a pain to convert the PPT ones, let alone that you'll need to fill in the gaps yourself if you put it into use) there are a few sites out there... both free and fee. At Keynoteuser.com and KeynoteHQ.com you can find links to news + freebies... there's a bit of a community starting to build.

[yellowdog]

Originally posted by walrusjb:
If you want to try out more Themes for Keynote that have been developed specifically for it (it seems a bit of a pain to convert the PPT ones, let alone that you'll need to fill in the gaps yourself if you put it into use) there are a few sites out there... both free and fee. At Keynoteuser.com and KeynoteHQ.com you can find links to news + freebies... there's a bit of a community starting to build.

Thanks for the site links - nice to see the interest in Keynote and have somewhere to go to get questions answered. The learning curve hasn't been as bad as I thought it would be.

[walrusjb]

The best Q&A location seems to be Apple's own Keynote Support forum:

http://discussions.info.apple.com/[email protected]

More happening there than anywhere else...

[KeynoteHQ]

There are also some additional themes available for free at KeynoteHQ.com though many user provided themes are no more than a background.

The photo cutouts have transparent areas for the "cutout" areas.

We also have a growing Keynote FAQ online.