[i_wolf]

Hi Guys,
I recently had access to a friends powerbook with Keynote installed and initially i was amazed. The slides he was showing me had cube effects, lots of transparant layers, graphics of compass' spinning, and text coming onto the slide, and then leaving as new text pushed it out of the way all seamingly on the one slide!
WOW!
I would like this for my presentations in the future.
The problem is that the presentations i do, tend to need very specific graphics or clipart. networking and software development and programming is my thing and on my friends powerbook i saw very little in the way of clip art supplied by apple. All i saw were 5 files with some reusable items inside.
Namely chart colours, flags, objects, pictures symbols and borders.
The problem is that within each one there was not a 'lot' of clipart. Certainly not as much clipart as you would get if you installed the optinional clipart that comes with Office X. however the clipart, pictures etc... was of a much higher quality. While i know I could go out and buy additional themes, for $99 i don't want to have to spend any more money on this.
I do have omnigraffle pro and that comes with lots of diagrams and charts that look much much more professional than the MS suff, but can i import any of my diagrams into keynote without loosing the layers and transparancy effects etc..??
Also can anyone tell me if perhaps my friend didn't just install all of keynote, if i bought keynote would there be much more clipart and stuff on the install cd??
Any advice much appreciated.

Kind Regards
i_wolf

[SupahCoolX]

Keynote doesn't come with much, but you can use just about any image format with it (JPG, GIF, TIFF, .psd, .pdf, etc). Just drag & drop images into your presentation. So, depending on what format they come in, OmniGraffle images should work.
You may also want to look at sites like keynotehq.com or keynoteuser.com (which have links to other sites, free themes, etc).

[mitchell_pgh]

The first thing you need to know is Keynote is designed for pro presentations with complex graphics. It is also designed for everyone that knows anything about graphics. It assumes that you have your own graphics. That being said, here are a few tidbits you might like.

1) I need VERY scientific images at times... My trick... Screen Shots

You can do an ?+SHIFT+4 (all at the same time) and you will get cross hairs. Pick what you want and go from there. It will give you a PDF on your desktop, drag that to your Keynote presentation.

2) Video. One thing Keynote does VERY VERY well is video and graphics. I'll find an interesting video and loop it...

3) Icons... "borrow" icons from any of the various OS X icon sites to make your own little graphics. I use a program called IconGrabber to convert them in to TIFF files (it knocks out the background) People LOVE this and because OS X has great icons... you look like a pro.

[MojoRising022]

Keynote cannot impoty OmniGraffle files, but can import OmniGraffle generated tiffs and pngs with alpha transparency and layers beautifully.

[threestain]

how do you do the screen shot short cut on a powerbook?

and do you mean ? + shift + 4 because you have to press shift to get ?

[mh0ffmann]

He meant COMMAND-Shift-4.

Mark

[i_wolf]

Thanks for the advice there guys. Yes i need good quality graphics but graphics isn't my forte. But again i need high quality professional images and diagrams in my presentation. Thats why i have forsaken some of the clipart that comes with powerpoint because it doesn't cut it.
I started to use omnigraffle pro and its absolutely excellent. The stencils and layer effects are first rate.
The only big problem is that importing images with layers doesn't seam to work properly?!??! I don't want to import as a pdf then i will get a white background and im quite keen on the default chalkboard so it tends to look a big naff. I had hoped to drag and drop but some of the diagrams need the layers and they don't seam to appear.
Is there any other way around this. Again I am testing this at the moment on a mates powerbook before i put money down. Maybe he isn't using the most up to date version??? I would have thought he does because he is forever checking software update.... who knows.

[MojoRising022]

I have had great success exporting to png from OmniGraffle with layered diagrams and transparency - give this a try.

[mitchell_pgh]

Originally posted by MojoRising022:
Keynote cannot impoty OmniGraffle files, but can import OmniGraffle generated tiffs and pngs with alpha transparency and layers beautifully.

You do know you can simply cut and paste from OmniGraffle in to Keynote... directly ... without having to export or import anything...

Also, if you were a cheap bastard, you could take all of the graphics from the OmniGraffle free download and use them in your keynote presentation...

[mitchell_pgh]

Here is a little something I threw together to show the cut and paste paste ability of OS X (one of the few nice things I must add)

www.bombaybungalow.com/sample.key.sit

[Brazuca]

Originally posted by i_wolf:
Thanks for the advice there guys. Yes i need good quality graphics but graphics isn't my forte. But again i need high quality professional images and diagrams in my presentation. Thats why i have forsaken some of the clipart that comes with powerpoint because it doesn't cut it.
I started to use omnigraffle pro and its absolutely excellent. The stencils and layer effects are first rate.
The only big problem is that importing images with layers doesn't seam to work properly?!??! I don't want to import as a pdf then i will get a white background and im quite keen on the default chalkboard so it tends to look a big naff. I had hoped to drag and drop but some of the diagrams need the layers and they don't seam to appear.
Is there any other way around this. Again I am testing this at the moment on a mates powerbook before i put money down. Maybe he isn't using the most up to date version??? I would have thought he does because he is forever checking software update.... who knows.

I'm pretty sure that PDFs are generated with transparent backgrounds. I even use Preview to crop my images.