If you are a scientist and haven't quite figured it out yet, Illustrator is where all Excel or any other charts end up before going anywhere else (to Keynote, to the journal as an EPS file, etc.)
Once in Illustrator, you can edit whatever garbage Excel has added, remove the text, and simply cut and paste into Keynote. This will create a beautiful graph, with the correct text added in Keynote.
If you are using a dark background in Keynote, simply create a black background layer in Illustrator and then lock it. You can then edit the Illustrator figure before cutting/pasting - the transparency will follow with the clipboard.
Try it - science should be presented well, and there is never a need to use PowerPoint unless you are forced to.
In my (10+ years) experience, most people use Powerpoint/Keynote for simple figures like bar and line charts and scatter plots. SPSS and excel produce graphs no better, and usually worse than Powerpoint/Keynote. And R is too complex for most people to use. But I suppose it depends on the field and the type of graph you want - obviously for very sophisticated graphs, you'll need something like R or a specialized graphing program.
In any case, there's no excuse for Keynote's lack of error bars.
Before Persuasion, we used to build slides in PageMaker and Illustator (Quark hadn't surfaced yet, and not enough people used "Ready, Set, GO" to trust getting slides made from it). We had to pay a photo processing house to output them as 35mm slides. And cringe as we prayed our "drop shadows" wouldn't move all over the film, and fret over color banding in gradients. Or bad fonts, especially using symbols within text.
Then wait for the inevitable wake-up call that some Jr VP left the slide carousel on the plane somewhere, or dropped it and got the slides all out of order at the last minute. Somehow, that was MarCom's fault...
Persuasion was a godsend, and was far ahead of PowerPoint in the early days, but died because MS bundled "Power-lessPoint" with Office, and everybody wanted Word 6 and Excel over WP 5.2.
Harvard Graphics was anemic, and that presentation app that came with Lotus Office (FreeLance?) wasn't very special either.
It's funny how companies abandoned Adobe Persuasion for PowerPoint since it was free, and then wonder why it has always sucked.
EXACTLY. Now whenever I have to make a presentation in an only PC setting, the only solution is exporting to Powerpoint in my Mac and then adjusting all the quirks. I hope this gets fixed. It´s always easier to carry a pen drive than haul and connect a Macbook.
What about saving your slides as a set of graphics, iPhoto 'em into an album, and then run a slide show from your iPod. Even have background music if you want. Transitions are limited, but it still looks better than a PPT. You can jump out to the sorter view and get to one or the other should follow-up Q&A require it. Easy to hook up to a projector with a video cable. I'm thinking the Touch should be killer for that application, cause you can even zoom in for detail if your need.
EDIT: Naturally, that won't help if you want a last minute change, but you're hosed there with just a file on a memory drive, too.
Of course I'd like a Keynote player for iPod/iPhone even better. Best of all, let me make typing edits on my iPod Touch/iPhone, too!
apple has better start getting serious about developing a real value proposition for the ipod ...
zune2 is actually not a big joke (unlike zune1); not to mention that htc and google dream phone and a few others are going to offer compettion in europe & _especially_ asia.
so the ipod needs a coherent plan (yes, i know: apple+coherence ... seems like an oxymoron).
and the focus of that plan must be interactive content!
* keynote is an obvious & glaring omission!
* cbt / especially language learning!
* shorthand note-taking
the ipod makes for a killer interactive (ESL) platform at a price-point that beats even the low-end laptop prices in asia! ... and besides, asia is a market where parents will pay serious money for anything with serious educational value.
not to mention the 100M tourists & students from north america & europe that are also engaging with other languages & cultures!
CAVEAT: apple is going to have to QUICKLY extend vox reco & tts (speech synthesis) to non-english languages in order to deal with the international language needs of mobile platforms!
apple said at wwdc that the new TTS engine in leopard does have hooks for other languages systems (besides english) ... but so far apple has made ZERO effort to hook up with the third-party speech technology companies to get them to re-target their products as plug-ins for this putatively extensible speech architecture (in leopard).
ONE MORE THING: the stylus.
yep, a stylus is unavoidable for certain classes of apps ...
* the whiteboarding/collaboration aspect of presentations (keynote <=> ichat)
* the obvious character-drawing aspect of second language learners!
* pitman shorthand for secretaries - plus other legal/medical/music notation systems
and no, a stylus does not undermine the 'finger' aspect of the iphone/itouch! -- it is a complement required for cursive script & for (non-zoom) gesturing.
moreover, apple has the opportunity to use the stylus in a novel way that adds value .... it could modify one of the existing special-purpose bluetooth 'digital pen' (eg the "annato" system) that can "write" in real ink on paper but transmit a digitized version of the pen motion back to an apple mobile device ....
by supporting some stylus facility in one of these digital pens, apple would have the complete solution for interactivity in a _small form-factor_ .... ie both speech in/out as well as complex pen input.
unfortunately, apple does not actively listen to its customers ... so we will never see any of these obvious "mac" features on an itouch or an iphone :-( ... and we can also recall steve jobs attitude to stylus input methods: in addition to the calamitous decision to cancel the newton (and then to remorsefully try to buy PALM), jobs dismissed the entire PDA effort as a waste of time ('at least with inkwell we finally got back something useful the newton').
... however, just as gps on the itouch/iphone would a hopeful sign that apple might be capable of learning from its mistakes, so i am not going to hold my breath for apple to "get it" about value-added services like presence-aware, language-savvy, interactive-oriented features.
Whatever the reasons are that they don't include Vizio and Access aren't really all that important. None of this is really all of that critical, because I would wager that quite a few people run Fusion/Parallels just to get the "real" MS Office. Why?
It ain't for Vizio or Access. It's also not for Publisher, OneNote, or any of that other crap.
It's all about OUTLOOK. Repeat after me. I-t i-s a-l-l a-b-o-u-t O-U-T-L-O-O-K.
Entourage is the most ridiculous application I've ever used. It's a direct insult to Mac users. You might as well just use Apple Mail's IMAP client and avoid the annoying daemons and other overhead associated with Entourage. There is not real MAPI support in it. It is a bad product, including the 2008 betas I've seen.
At least one company has reverse-engineered MAPI to produce an Exchange server clone. If they can establish true white-room reverse engineering, Apple should buy them, and include Exchange server support in Apple Mail. Now. There's also an open source project, but it's barely off the ground.
What should be made very clear is this: Office is dominant because it has a critical mass of users, and it uses yet another new proprietary file format. Many people would use non-Office products if they could reliably open and use those documents in other products, especially free ones. But many of those people would still be stuck on Exchange server, just because so many companies use it and the investment is too huge just to throw away. Fine let them keep their easily corrupted JET p.o.s servers, but open it up!
If you free users from Outlook, you will free them from Office. If you free them from Office you will free them from Windows. Microsoft knows this, that's why you have .docx and that's why they don't have a real MAPI client on Mac.
Before Persuasion, we used to build slides in PageMaker and Illustator (Quark hadn't surfaced yet, and not enough people used "Ready, Set, GO" to trust getting slides made from it). We had to pay a photo processing house to output them as 35mm slides. And cringe as we prayed our "drop shadows" wouldn't move all over the film, and fret over color banding in gradients. Or bad fonts, especially using symbols within text.
Then wait for the inevitable wake-up call that some Jr VP left the slide carousel on the plane somewhere, or dropped it and got the slides all out of order at the last minute. Somehow, that was MarCom's fault...
Persuasion was a godsend,
Did all that. Worse was the product manager that couldn't even spell his name.
I really wish Apple would make a free downloadable Keynote player application for Windows. Or even better, make a special output format that is a self-playing application on any computer without the Keynote app. They don't need to port the entire app, necessarily; just give presenters a way to play their keynote files on a PC natively. I know you can export to Quicktime or PDF, or translate to PowerPoint. I'm talking about preserving all the functionality of the presentation without translation at all.
99.9999% of the time I take my own laptop for every presentation I do. But there are those times where there are multiple presenters, and you're forced by the lame audio/visual guy to use a shared PC. It would be great if there were a way to just play any presentation on any machine.
It's called QuickTime!
Just export to QuickTime and you can view the sideshow with full effects interactively! Click advancements and timing are preserved!
I've been using Keynote for about three weeks now, and I have to say that I am not "wow"ed. It's good eye-candy for sure and generates a few ooohs and aaahs (cool transitions, build-ins/-outs, action and such), but the bottom line is, I am finding it easier to create the basic version in PPT and import it into Keynote, do further edits, and present.
I am also disappointed by the clunky print feature (try printing in B&W by omitting background clutter, or, e.g., two slides to a page), its lack of ability to seamlessly export to PPT (e.g., even themes), the surprisingly pedestrian themes (and, as of writing, my relative lack of ease in being able to play around with its settings -- that could be because I have not looked at the manual, but then who has the time to do that; it should be obvious to do esp. seeing as it is from Apple), some MSFT-type labels (where the heck did they come up with "Inspector"), etc.
Overall, it is cute, it is a decent early effort, but not ready for prime time.
I really wish Apple would make a free downloadable Keynote player application for Windows.
The must-have for Keynote is the ability to distribute decks to attendees after the presentation. That's standard procedure at our firm. Ideally I'd like to just be able to carry my iPhone or touch into a meeting, hook up to the projector via the dock connector, and afterwards have a way to distribute a self-contained deck.
Yes, but why not have graphs and charts browse-able within keynote like photos, video and audio? Then give users the ability to edit within keynote. Maybe you might want to change the colors of a graph or background once you've brought it into KN. That would make the app better IMO.
Then give users the ability to edit within keynote. Maybe you might want to change the colors of a graph or background once you've brought it into KN. That would make the app better IMO.
Of course it would. I'd be very happy to see LinkBack support in Keynote, for example.
But you were talking about importing charts, not editing them. Importing is most definitely possible, and quite easily done.
Along the same lines, Marware's Project X (below) provides project management software compatible with Microsoft's Project files but developed specifically to take advantage of features in Mac OS X, leaving little demand for a Mac version of Project.
I can't believe reading this here! Did any real project manager worked with this app? It has errors in its calculations, it is slow and very hard to use. I tried it our a couple of times. It is unusable - especially in large projects.
If you want to know what I prefer? Merlin (http://www.merlin2.net) - this tool really rocks! V2.5 even in a network.
Comments
If you are a scientist and haven't quite figured it out yet, Illustrator is where all Excel or any other charts end up before going anywhere else (to Keynote, to the journal as an EPS file, etc.)
Once in Illustrator, you can edit whatever garbage Excel has added, remove the text, and simply cut and paste into Keynote. This will create a beautiful graph, with the correct text added in Keynote.
If you are using a dark background in Keynote, simply create a black background layer in Illustrator and then lock it. You can then edit the Illustrator figure before cutting/pasting - the transparency will follow with the clipboard.
Try it - science should be presented well, and there is never a need to use PowerPoint unless you are forced to.
In my (10+ years) experience, most people use Powerpoint/Keynote for simple figures like bar and line charts and scatter plots. SPSS and excel produce graphs no better, and usually worse than Powerpoint/Keynote. And R is too complex for most people to use. But I suppose it depends on the field and the type of graph you want - obviously for very sophisticated graphs, you'll need something like R or a specialized graphing program.
In any case, there's no excuse for Keynote's lack of error bars.
In any case, there's no excuse for Keynote's lack of error bars.
IMO, Keynote needs better integration with numbers. IIRC, graphs can't be imported into Keynote from Numbers. Why, I don't know.
The best solution would be one that allows for nice chart/graph composition in numbers and then easy importation into Keynote. IMO.
I am with you on that. And I'll bet you were a Pagemaker guy too.
By the way, Edward Tufte used Persuasion too. (http://5f06e5334a111530fee8ef15b4e3b....ศ.+2442)
Before Persuasion, we used to build slides in PageMaker and Illustator (Quark hadn't surfaced yet, and not enough people used "Ready, Set, GO" to trust getting slides made from it). We had to pay a photo processing house to output them as 35mm slides. And cringe as we prayed our "drop shadows" wouldn't move all over the film, and fret over color banding in gradients. Or bad fonts, especially using symbols within text.
Then wait for the inevitable wake-up call that some Jr VP left the slide carousel on the plane somewhere, or dropped it and got the slides all out of order at the last minute. Somehow, that was MarCom's fault...
Persuasion was a godsend, and was far ahead of PowerPoint in the early days, but died because MS bundled "Power-lessPoint" with Office, and everybody wanted Word 6 and Excel over WP 5.2.
Harvard Graphics was anemic, and that presentation app that came with Lotus Office (FreeLance?) wasn't very special either.
It's funny how companies abandoned Adobe Persuasion for PowerPoint since it was free, and then wonder why it has always sucked.
EXACTLY. Now whenever I have to make a presentation in an only PC setting, the only solution is exporting to Powerpoint in my Mac and then adjusting all the quirks. I hope this gets fixed. It´s always easier to carry a pen drive than haul and connect a Macbook.
What about saving your slides as a set of graphics, iPhoto 'em into an album, and then run a slide show from your iPod. Even have background music if you want. Transitions are limited, but it still looks better than a PPT. You can jump out to the sorter view and get to one or the other should follow-up Q&A require it. Easy to hook up to a projector with a video cable. I'm thinking the Touch should be killer for that application, cause you can even zoom in for detail if your need.
EDIT: Naturally, that won't help if you want a last minute change, but you're hosed there with just a file on a memory drive, too.
Of course I'd like a Keynote player for iPod/iPhone even better. Best of all, let me make typing edits on my iPod Touch/iPhone, too!
zune2 is actually not a big joke (unlike zune1); not to mention that htc and google dream phone and a few others are going to offer compettion in europe & _especially_ asia.
so the ipod needs a coherent plan (yes, i know: apple+coherence ... seems like an oxymoron).
and the focus of that plan must be interactive content!
* keynote is an obvious & glaring omission!
* cbt / especially language learning!
* shorthand note-taking
the ipod makes for a killer interactive (ESL) platform at a price-point that beats even the low-end laptop prices in asia! ... and besides, asia is a market where parents will pay serious money for anything with serious educational value.
not to mention the 100M tourists & students from north america & europe that are also engaging with other languages & cultures!
CAVEAT: apple is going to have to QUICKLY extend vox reco & tts (speech synthesis) to non-english languages in order to deal with the international language needs of mobile platforms!
apple said at wwdc that the new TTS engine in leopard does have hooks for other languages systems (besides english) ... but so far apple has made ZERO effort to hook up with the third-party speech technology companies to get them to re-target their products as plug-ins for this putatively extensible speech architecture (in leopard).
ONE MORE THING: the stylus.
yep, a stylus is unavoidable for certain classes of apps ...
* the whiteboarding/collaboration aspect of presentations (keynote <=> ichat)
* the obvious character-drawing aspect of second language learners!
* pitman shorthand for secretaries - plus other legal/medical/music notation systems
and no, a stylus does not undermine the 'finger' aspect of the iphone/itouch! -- it is a complement required for cursive script & for (non-zoom) gesturing.
moreover, apple has the opportunity to use the stylus in a novel way that adds value .... it could modify one of the existing special-purpose bluetooth 'digital pen' (eg the "annato" system) that can "write" in real ink on paper but transmit a digitized version of the pen motion back to an apple mobile device ....
by supporting some stylus facility in one of these digital pens, apple would have the complete solution for interactivity in a _small form-factor_ .... ie both speech in/out as well as complex pen input.
unfortunately, apple does not actively listen to its customers ... so we will never see any of these obvious "mac" features on an itouch or an iphone :-( ... and we can also recall steve jobs attitude to stylus input methods: in addition to the calamitous decision to cancel the newton (and then to remorsefully try to buy PALM), jobs dismissed the entire PDA effort as a waste of time ('at least with inkwell we finally got back something useful the newton').
... however, just as gps on the itouch/iphone would a hopeful sign that apple might be capable of learning from its mistakes, so i am not going to hold my breath for apple to "get it" about value-added services like presence-aware, language-savvy, interactive-oriented features.
sigh.
It ain't for Vizio or Access. It's also not for Publisher, OneNote, or any of that other crap.
It's all about OUTLOOK. Repeat after me. I-t i-s a-l-l a-b-o-u-t O-U-T-L-O-O-K.
Entourage is the most ridiculous application I've ever used. It's a direct insult to Mac users. You might as well just use Apple Mail's IMAP client and avoid the annoying daemons and other overhead associated with Entourage. There is not real MAPI support in it. It is a bad product, including the 2008 betas I've seen.
At least one company has reverse-engineered MAPI to produce an Exchange server clone. If they can establish true white-room reverse engineering, Apple should buy them, and include Exchange server support in Apple Mail. Now. There's also an open source project, but it's barely off the ground.
What should be made very clear is this: Office is dominant because it has a critical mass of users, and it uses yet another new proprietary file format. Many people would use non-Office products if they could reliably open and use those documents in other products, especially free ones. But many of those people would still be stuck on Exchange server, just because so many companies use it and the investment is too huge just to throw away. Fine let them keep their easily corrupted JET p.o.s servers, but open it up!
If you free users from Outlook, you will free them from Office. If you free them from Office you will free them from Windows. Microsoft knows this, that's why you have .docx and that's why they don't have a real MAPI client on Mac.
Before Persuasion, we used to build slides in PageMaker and Illustator (Quark hadn't surfaced yet, and not enough people used "Ready, Set, GO" to trust getting slides made from it). We had to pay a photo processing house to output them as 35mm slides. And cringe as we prayed our "drop shadows" wouldn't move all over the film, and fret over color banding in gradients. Or bad fonts, especially using symbols within text.
Then wait for the inevitable wake-up call that some Jr VP left the slide carousel on the plane somewhere, or dropped it and got the slides all out of order at the last minute. Somehow, that was MarCom's fault...
Persuasion was a godsend,
Did all that. Worse was the product manager that couldn't even spell his name.
I really wish Apple would make a free downloadable Keynote player application for Windows. Or even better, make a special output format that is a self-playing application on any computer without the Keynote app. They don't need to port the entire app, necessarily; just give presenters a way to play their keynote files on a PC natively. I know you can export to Quicktime or PDF, or translate to PowerPoint. I'm talking about preserving all the functionality of the presentation without translation at all.
99.9999% of the time I take my own laptop for every presentation I do. But there are those times where there are multiple presenters, and you're forced by the lame audio/visual guy to use a shared PC. It would be great if there were a way to just play any presentation on any machine.
It's called QuickTime!
Just export to QuickTime and you can view the sideshow with full effects interactively! Click advancements and timing are preserved!
I am also disappointed by the clunky print feature (try printing in B&W by omitting background clutter, or, e.g., two slides to a page), its lack of ability to seamlessly export to PPT (e.g., even themes), the surprisingly pedestrian themes (and, as of writing, my relative lack of ease in being able to play around with its settings -- that could be because I have not looked at the manual, but then who has the time to do that; it should be obvious to do esp. seeing as it is from Apple), some MSFT-type labels (where the heck did they come up with "Inspector"), etc.
Overall, it is cute, it is a decent early effort, but not ready for prime time.
PS: Those of you that may have an answer to my printing-related question, could you please check http://discussions.apple.com/thread....01641&tstart=0 (thanks in advance if you can help resolve it).
I really wish Apple would make a free downloadable Keynote player application for Windows.
The must-have for Keynote is the ability to distribute decks to attendees after the presentation. That's standard procedure at our firm. Ideally I'd like to just be able to carry my iPhone or touch into a meeting, hook up to the projector via the dock connector, and afterwards have a way to distribute a self-contained deck.
Without that, I'm afraid I'm stuck with PP.
IMO, Keynote needs better integration with numbers. IIRC, graphs can't be imported into Keynote from Numbers. Why, I don't know.
Uh, have you tried cutting and pasting???
Uh, have you tried cutting and pasting???
Yes, but why not have graphs and charts browse-able within keynote like photos, video and audio? Then give users the ability to edit within keynote. Maybe you might want to change the colors of a graph or background once you've brought it into KN. That would make the app better IMO.
Then give users the ability to edit within keynote. Maybe you might want to change the colors of a graph or background once you've brought it into KN. That would make the app better IMO.
Of course it would. I'd be very happy to see LinkBack support in Keynote, for example.
But you were talking about importing charts, not editing them. Importing is most definitely possible, and quite easily done.
Along the same lines, Marware's Project X (below) provides project management software compatible with Microsoft's Project files but developed specifically to take advantage of features in Mac OS X, leaving little demand for a Mac version of Project.
I can't believe reading this here! Did any real project manager worked with this app? It has errors in its calculations, it is slow and very hard to use. I tried it our a couple of times. It is unusable - especially in large projects.
If you want to know what I prefer? Merlin (http://www.merlin2.net) - this tool really rocks! V2.5 even in a network.