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No, there's not a Keynote Viewer for Windows. I've always been of the feeling that iWork isn't and probably will never be a replacement for Microsoft Office. If you are in a position where you don't need to share documents with others that are using Microsoft Office (that's me, some home users, etc.) then Keynote is an excellent presentation. KEY to PDF - Convert file now View other document file formats Technical Details Official file format specifications for iWork Keynote files are not published by Apple, but it is still possible to look at a developer document Apple released for iWork '05 file formats.
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Keynote 8 (Mac)
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Keynote Reader For Mac
Keynote 8 for Mac hasn’t reached the apex of its perfection, but Apple clearly didn’t have a wishlist of features to push it forward. The latest release for Mac brings it up to date with simultaneous releases of Keynote for iOS and Pages (Mac and iOS) and Numbers [Mac and iOS].
Keynote 8: Getting up to speed
We haven’t reviewed Keynote since version 6.5.3 in 2015, so it’s worth a look of what’s changed since then. Apple continued to push forward development through incremental releases from 7.0 to 7.3, which restored a number of features that we found lacking in 6.5.3.
Version 7.0 added a beta of collaborative real-time editing. Version 7.1 offered up one of the most significant changes: an Object List that made creating complicated builds vastly easier, as selecting and ordering items in the build was a frustrating process that lead to literal head-to-desk slamming. It’s still weaker than other presentation apps, and I’ve spent hours moving items around to create the right flow—but at least now, it’s feasible. In version 7.2, navigation and marking up a document in text (with replies and threaded comments) became far better.
Keynote 8: New features
In Keynote 8, Apple added a small list of features that make it easier to move presentations between iOS and macOS. Also, there's more consistency with tools and expectations across Keynote, Pages, and Numbers on both platforms. That should reduce any friction as you work among apps and across platforms, even if nothing else has changed.
Image galleries are the only new interactive feature, letting you insert and label images in a frame that can be paged through manually or as an auto-advance slideshow. You can preview this while setting it up, and then advance through the images while presenting or set it to run. Creating a pseudo-slideshow through builds in version 7.3 was maddening; now, it’s just a drag and drop process. For automatic or manual playback, you can set one of three kinds of builds through the images: Appear, Dissolve, and Move In. For automatic playback, you can set the duration between images. This is a very welcome addition.
Media selection remains extremely laggy, even on a 2017 iMac. While I have an iCloud Photo Library of over 37,000 images, they’re stored at full resolution on this iMac, and it took minutes to bring up the initial selection view. If you switch away from Keynote, at least the load progress is not lost (as it is in Pages 7 for Mac). The media selector is a system-wide function, but it’s readily apparent how poorly optimized it is in a program designed to use images.
Keynote now offers donut charts, a missing option despite the many other kinds of charts available in this and other Apple productivity apps. As with all the updates to apps, there are new shapes of all sorts you can insert and then edit to customize. Support for real-time collaborative editing for Keynote files shared via the Box document service is now included here as in all the productivity apps on both platforms.
Apple also added a way to reduce the file size of presentations, something useful when you’re dragging in full-resolution images or movies that you’re using just a portion of. With File > Reduce File Size, you can opt to downsample, using Apple’s versions of more efficient HEIF image and HEVC video compression, and clip video and audio to store just the portions used in the file. Be wary, though, that you don’t create a presentation that needs to run on an older Mac that can’t display these file formats.
Bottom line
Keynote 8 for macOS is not much more than a maintenance release, despite inserting the suite-wide image gallery feature as a slideshow option. Even though it’s a mature app that’s generally good to use, Apple should be considering a roadmap for improvement of its weakest elements, and pushing forward with new modes and better processes for building and revising interactions.
Keynote 8 (Mac)
Learn moreThe latest release of Keynote for macOS brings little to the table, letting Keynote show its signs of age.
Pros
- Stability in a relatively mature program
- Gallery option allows easy creation of timed slideshows
- Better feature parity and compatibility across apps and platforms
Cons
- No effort to move the app significantly forward
- Pros
Beautiful, eye-catching, customizable presentation templates. Clear interface. Tight integration with MacOS. Good transition and animation effects.
- Cons
MP4 not supported as export file type. Collaboration features still in beta.
- Bottom Line
Keynote is a powerful app for building and delivering beautiful presentations. Gorgeous templates and tight integration with other Apple apps make it an Editors' Choice for Mac users.
If you've ever used Apple's Keynote to create a presentation, you won't need to read a recommendation for it. For years, it's been the gold standard of presentation apps for Mac users, and it still is. Its success is partly attributable to tight integration with the Mac ecosystem, giving easy access to iTunes tracks, iPhoto images, and videos. Keynote isn't the only high-scoring presentation app, however. The latest version of Microsoft PowerPoint provides strong competition, and if you already have PowerPoint, you needn't suffer from Keynote envy. They're both Editors' Choices. You can't go wrong with either, although Keynote has the edge on the Mac.
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Price
Apple Keynote is affordable because, for most Mac users, it comes included with the purchase of a laptop or desktop computer (available to anyone who bought a new Mac on or after October 1, 2013). If it's not installed on your machine, you can get it from the App Store at no cost. Mac users with older devices can buy Keynote for a low one-time fee of $19.99.
Note that there is no longer a single suite of productivity apps called iWork, which is what Apple used to call its Microsoft Office competitor. You can, however, buy all the software for one fee, in the form of what Apple calls Bundle for iWork, which includes Keynote, word processing app Pages and spreadsheet app Numbers, for a total of just $19.99. That's one-third what you'd pay for them separately.
Additionally, there's a version of Keynote on iCloud.com that's free to use by anyone who has an iCloud account and an Internet connection.
Free Keynote Reader For Macbook
PowerPoint, the biggest name in the presentation space, costs $69.99 per year as one component of a Personal subscription to
Prezi, which is an Editors' Choice for nontraditional presentation apps, costs more than either Keynote or PowerPoint: $59.04 per year (yes, it's an odd price) for its Enjoy plan, $159 per year for Prezi Pro (which adds unlimited storage, access to presentations on any device, offline access, premium support, and image-editing tools), and $240 per year for Pro Plus (which adds advanced training). Monthly plans run $10, $20, and $30, respectively. Given that Keynote costs either nothing or a one-time fee of $19.99, that $30 monthly fee for Prezi Pro Plus might seem hard to swallow.
PowToon is another unusual presentation app. It helps you create animations instead of typical slideshow presentations, but it comes at a high price as well. A PowToon Pro account costs $228 per year or a very steep monthly price of $89. A Business plan starts at $708 per year or $197 per month for one user; organizations looking to add multiple seats can contact PowToon for a price quote. There is a free version of PowToon, but any presentations you make are watermarked with a logo and contain an advertisement for PowToon at the end. That's reason enough not to use the free version for anything other than getting a basic feel for it.
If you want a truly free presentation tool that works on both Mac and Windows, Google Slides is your best bet. Its collaboration features are stronger than Keynote's (which are still in beta). Google Slides has an option for presenters to generate on demand a URL at which audience members can submit questions while watching a presentation. The presenter gets the questions in real time. It's one of the more interactive features we've seen in any presentation app.
Keynote's Interface
If you've used Apple Pages or Numbers, Keynote will seem instantly familiar. The app's major convenience is its three-panel interface, with a thumbnail panel at the left, large editing panel in the middle, and formatting options at the right. As in the other former iWorks apps, the formatting panel works like a spacious version of an old-style inspector window. You use a toolbar to switch the panel among controls over layout, animations, and the whole presentation. The panel itself displays a different set of controls depending on the kind of visual element you've selected in the editing window. Easy-to-use orange guidelines appear when you resize or move visual elements, complete with pop-up displays of width and height in pixels.
Apple's transitions include all the dazzling effects you expect and more. For example, popping flashbulbs can type your text, and the genuinely impressive Magic Move gives the illusion of one text element (text or picture) moving between one slide and another as the next slide appears. Keynote makes it easy to create transitions for some or all the rows, columns, and cells in a table, a feat that's difficult in PowerPoint. Fancy transitions inevitably tempt you to use too much of a good thing, however, and Keynote's transitions are more tempting than most.
Graphics
Keynote's built-in graphic tools include Instant Alpha (which lets you click a color to make it transparent) easily drawn masks, and sliders that let you choose a Poster Frame thumbnail for a video. You can optimize inserted videos for iOS (in 720p format) or leave them in their original form for macOS, and you can set a preference that automatically optimizes all inserted videos for iOS.
Keynote Help For Mac
PowerPoint, on the other hand, offers Mac users the ability to adjust brightness and contrast in videos inside PowerPoint itself, while Keynote users will have to open iMovie or another video editor to make the same adjustments. PowerPoint also includes a unique and innovative interface for moving slide elements backward or forward by displaying them in a three-dimensional side view in which it's easy to select and manipulate individual elements.
Everything that you can create in Numbers or Pages can also go into a Keynote presentation. You can even insert the same unique interactive charts available in Numbers, which let you drag a slider along one axis while the changing data is displayed in animated form in the chart. The only difference is that Keynote displays an interactive chart as an animation—showing how the chart changes when you drag the slider along its axis—rather than letting you actually drag the slider.
Sharing and Collaboration
Not long ago, you typically showed your presentations in a conference room with a projector. Today, you may need to show them on the Web. Both Keynote and PowerPoint can export presentations as video files: QuickTime for Keynote, but the more versatile MP4 for PowerPoint. Keynote can also automatically upload movie versions of its presentations to Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo, and YouTube, or it can upload your presentation to iCloud and instantly create a link that anyone can use to view it.
Keynote has some collaboration capabilities, though they are currently in beta. You can share your presentation with others via Messages, Mail, AirDrop, and other services. You can also simply copy and paste a link to the presentation using whatever app you choose. All the collaborators need iCloud accounts to see and edit the presentation. You can control whether the collaborators can view or edit the presentation, although it's not person-by-person control. Either everyone can edit your presentation or no one can. We're interested to see how these beta features develop.
If you need a tool with fully baked support for collaboration, Google Slides and Prezi are your best choices. In Google Slides, collaborating works the same way it does for any other Google Docs or G Suite app that supports it. When you share a file with others, everyone can see and edit the same file simultaneously. A color-coded cursor appears on screen, showing you exactly who is making the changes as they occur. Slides also offers commenting tools and a chat box to support discussion. The ease of collaborating in Google Slides is one of the service's biggest perks. You don't have to worry about recipients owning a copy of the software or anything other than whether they have a Google account and an Internet connection.
Prezi works similarly. As with Google Slides, you can see who else is in the file and edit the material together in real time. Up to 10 people can collaborate at once, and all you need are their email addresses to invite them.
PowerPoint has some collaboration features, but they're clunkier to use. When you want to collaborate on a file, you first have to save the slideshow to the cloud (such as into your OneDrive or SharePoint space) and then invite people. Your collaborators have to be using PowerPoint 2010 or later, or the latest release of PowerPoint Online for it to work.
PowToon has very limited collaboration capabilities compared with other presentation apps, and what it does offer is only in beta at the moment. Both you and a single collaborator need Business-grade accounts to use it, and collaboration here simply means the ability to make a copy of your presentation and send it to another user so that it shows up in his or her list of videos upon logging into the app. The other person can then work on the file and send it back to you, again by making a copy of the file that will show up in your list of presentations when you log into PowToon. It's a far cry from the real-time collaboration and saved history of changes you get with Prezi and Google Slides.
A Key Tool for Mac Users
Keynote doesn't do everything PowerPoint can, but it does more of what you need to create elegant and eye-catching presentations, thanks to top-notch transitions, effects, and animations. It's tightly integrated with macOS and its associated apps and has an excellent, highly usable interface. It won't fundamentally change the way you think about presenting data—for that, try Prezi. Nor is it a killer collaboration tool like Google Slides, though its beta features look promising. PowerPoint is the other clear frontrunner for presentation software, and if you're accustomed to it, you'll probably want to stick with it whether you use a Windows or Mac computer. But Keynote is the clear first choice for Mac users, and the fact that it comes free with every new Mac makes it an even more obvious Editors' Choice for presentation apps on the Mac.
Apple Keynote (for Mac)
Bottom Line: Keynote is a powerful app for building and delivering beautiful presentations. Gorgeous templates and tight integration with other Apple apps make it an Editors' Choice for Mac users.
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