I'm the Keynote!

September 7, 2009 9:59 PM

Apple Keynote '09 Lazyweb: I want to hide slides but be able to refer to them. What's the easiest way to do this?

I have a presentation to give on Friday. I'm planning to have my Apple Macbook Pro with Keynote '09, and I'll also have my iPhone handy to act as a remote control. It will either be a 2 hour discussion / presentation, or it will be a 10 hour discussion / presentation depending on how many questions I need to answer and the information I need to answer each.

In Keynote, I can have hidden slides with the depth I need in them that won't show by default during the presentation, but I can't seem to access these at all to show them conditionally during the presentation. That means that I'd have to dig into some exceptionally deep material without visual aids, which ... ain't gonna happen.

Even though I have a business degree, it's been years since I've had to give a presentation. I know all the basics and I'm loving the "presenter's notes" features that will allow me to walk around the room and still be able to see my notes (on the iPhone) without having to put EVERYTHING on the slides. That's one of my major pet peeves about presentations dead on the doorstep. Bang!

The presentation isn't going to be that broad, but it could get exceptionally deep if the audience requires it. (The target's got a PhD in Computer Science, but I don't know how many white papers on storage redundancy in medical research regulatory environments he's read recently.) I have to show up prepared to answer tough questions, and I'll need visual aids to do that.

Any tips or techniques from the professional presentors in the audience?

posted by SpecialK to work & money (2 comments total)

I'm not sure if these things you may need to link to could be set up as individual slideshows but Keynote has some fairly advanced linking features where you could have links set up to entirely different slideshows that would only show up if you activated a link and otherwise not show up at all. The ends of your sections could have "more information" sorts of links that you could click if you needd to get more in-depth and otherwise pass by. What I wish Keynote did was allowd you to do this sort of thing with the hidden slides [i.e. sort of like choose your own adventure sorts of things] within one presentation but I don't see a way to do this and I'm pretty conversant in Keynote.
posted by jessamyn at 10:34 PM on September 7

Put all the "extra" slides at the end of the presentation. Write a little post-it note that says:

Extra FOO info: starts on slide 30
Extra BAR info: starts on slide 35
Vacation PHOTOS: starts on slide 40
...

Then, during the Keynote presentation, type "=" and then the slide number (e.g. "30") to jump instantly to that slide. Before doing so, note the page number at the bottom of the slide and use it to jump back. The above link also discusses embedding links in your slide; this eliminates the post-it note, but you have to predict which like you're going to jump FROM in advance.

True, you have to march to the keyboard to mash the keys, but the slickness of not having to fumble around the slide viewer while the audience stares at your cat picture on the desktop makes up for the trip.

OR

This article suggests that Apple's remote software for the iPhone has no such jumping feature, but that another app, Stage Hand, does.
posted by fatllama at 1:27 AM on September 8