Building great presentations requires organization. An often overlooked tool when organizing your presentations is Keynote itself.
I found a lot of people create presentations by opening PowerPoint or Keynote, selecting a template, and then replacing text in the placeholders. While this works, I believe a more efficient way to create a presentation is by using the built-in Outline function. Here’s how you do it.
Create a new presentation
Here I’m creating a new presentation from the theme chooser. Pick your template and click Choose.
Click the View Button
Click the View button to show the different view options available to you.
Select Outline
Choose Outline from the View menu. The left-hand pane changes to reflect Outline mode.
Outline Pane
The Outline Pane allows you to type text into it.
Resize the Outline Pane if necessary
Drag the pane adjuster to make the Outline Pane larger or smaller. Making it larger avoids unnecessary text wrap.
Type Text
Follow these steps to enter text:
• Click on a slide icon.
• Type text in field
• Press Return/Enter to create a new slide
• Press Tab to indent and create a sub-bullet
• Press Shift-Tab to outdent and create higher bullet or new slide
Reorder Slides
Click on the slide image, How-to in this instance, and drag the slide up to change it’s order. You can also grab the slide and drag it to the right or left to increase the indent or outdent.
This is a great way to re-organize your thoughts.
Best Practices
My suggestion is to get as much "out of your head" as possible. Type each thought as it comes to you. Don’t worry about the order or organization–just get the thoughts down. After you feel you’ve exhausted some ideas, rearrange the slides and put them in a more logical sequence. See if your sides should be bullets to other slides.
Use the Outline View and NOT a Text Box to add your text. Using the Outline View allows you to change the format of your text on a Master Slide and have the new formatting applied throughout your presentation. If you use a text box, you have to manually update each individual slide with the new formatting. Or if you’d rather, you can apply a new template and have the new formatting automatically applied throughout your presentation. This technique alone can save you hours of work.
And finally, make sure your slides have a logical beginning and end. I refer to this as "bookends" to your presentation.
Good luck.
