Making keynote Themes, why the hell so hard

Posted At : January 8, 2008 7:54 PM | Posted By : John
Related Categories: Random,Mac,360Flex

I'm getting the powerpoint (ick) and keynote templates ready to hadn out to speakers for 360|Flex, and jeebus it was hard to do!

in this regard, i have to hand it to Microsoft. Making a power point template is not hard at all, keynote on the other hand, harder than is reasonable.

It took a ton of googling to find the right phrase, to find this little gem

The basic jist is, don't waste your time modifiying a slide, drag the divider bar above the slides pallette to reveal the hideen, "Master Slides

You'll modify these. What I did was modify the first one, and remove the others. That way, whenever the user selectd "new slide" they get the one I created.

Not Flex related, only tangentially 360|Flex related, but now, each time I'm working on our speaker preso templates, I'll have saved myself some time. I like that!

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Matt Platte's Gravatar Yep. Been there. You would've laughed at how difficult it was for me to figure out how to burn a CD on my new Macbook (my fourth or fifth Mac since the 1980's)!
# Posted By Matt Platte | 1/8/08 10:19 PM
Joe Rinehart's Gravatar This confused me at first, but to be fair to Apple, the link to instructions on "Customizing Master Slides and Themes" is in bold on the first page of Keynote Help.
# Posted By Joe Rinehart | 1/9/08 7:57 AM
John's Gravatar @joe, that may be, but since they hide master slides to begin with, I had no idea they were part of the equation, but yeah I'm sure it's no Top Secret, more like hidden in plain sight. LOL
# Posted By John | 1/9/08 8:42 AM
Peter Hanley's Gravatar This is a late response, but out of curiosity did you find that the slide masters in PowerPoint less hidden? I didn't have this much trouble with it (it did take a little searching to find though), but because I assumed I'd have to alter the master pages like you do in PowerPoint.

I'm not ragging, it's just hard for me to see how finding the master page area is easier in PowerPoint (they both seem equally well hidden and non-obvious to a beginner to me).
# Posted By Peter Hanley | 2/9/08 11:21 AM
John W's Gravatar @Peter,

Actually I didn't do the powerpoint templates for this use, my business partner did, he's a windozer, I won't load Office on to my Mac :)

I'm not surprised Power Point is as hard.

Funny such a straightforward activity is so non-easy. EVEN on a mac, LOL
# Posted By John W | 2/9/08 12:14 PM
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