If you do use Keynote on a Mac. It’s difficult to hold your iPad while giving a presentation without the video cable falling out—I speak from personal experience.

It's regularly claimed that number one best feature about is that it is not. We wouldn't disagree. PowerPoint is complex when you're making a presentation and doesn't get easier when you're in the audience.

Just watch anybody, new or experienced, struggle with finding where PowerPoint hides its Play Slides button and you'll wish they'd used Keynote. There is also the fact that PowerPoint slides somehow always look like they're PowerPoint slides. Keynote does seem different because fewer people use it.

If that's you, if you're turning to Keynote to just be a little distinctive, you're in good company. Steve Jobs did exactly the same thing. If you also use Keynote because it's free and comes on your Mac and iPad then there's obviously nothing wrong with that either. Mac image for virtualbox. However, you may be underestimating this software. Keynote is vastly easier to use than PowerPoint and it's not because it has fewer features.

Like everything Apple does, Keynote has powerful functions that are kept out of your view until you need them. That's the case both when you're creating a presentation and later when you are actually in front of the audience. Keynote has so many tools that we're dividing this into two articles. This one is about how you make a complex and compelling presentation, then part two will be about how Keynote helps you actually present it to an audience.

Making a presentation using Outline View So few presenters even know this exists. Right inside Keynote on the Mac, there is an outlining feature that lets you rapidly bash in all the ideas you've got for your presentation. Write a line or a note, hit Return, write the next one and keep going until it's all out of your head.

Then drag the lines around to reorder them. It is a basic outliner but it lets you write headings and then add subtopics. It lets you collapse and expand lines so that you can see all the detail or just headings.

What's more, every line you write in this outline is automatically a new slide in the presentation. On the Mac, open Keynote, start a presentation by choosing File, New and then in the View menu select Outline View. It isn't a particularly powerful feature. If you have a complex presentation to make or you're at the stage where really you're still trying to figure out what you want to cover, use something. If you do that, then you can write as complex an outline as you want and export it from OmniOutliner in PowerPoint format.

Then in Keynote, choose Open, Open and select the PowerPoint-style document. Keynote brings the outline in and you can edit or amend it in the Outline View.

This is where you hit the limits of Keynote's outlining: it will certainly display the top and second level of an OmniOutliner outline but that's all. If you've gone further with multiple levels of thoughts and notes, you won't see them in Keynote. Unfortunately you won't see the outline at all in Keynote for iOS as there is no Outline View in that. This is another reason for using an alternative like OmniOutliner, however. You can Share the outline from OmniOutliner into Keynote to start your presentation yet keep the full one viewable in the outlining app.