Using OmniOutliner

Keynote's Outline View is adequate for many slide shows, but when you have a large presentation, it's a good idea to turn to a program that's designed to handle big outlines. The Omni Group 's (www.omnigroup.com) OmniOutliner is perfect for the task ( Figure 2.9 ). It's got all the power you need to write an outline that you can move to Keynote to turn into a great presentation. The program's topics and subtopics correspond to slide titles and bullet points, and OmniOutliner has a Notes pane that translates neatly into Keynote's speaker notes.

Figure 2.9. OmniOutliner's outline format, with its topics and subtopics, maps well to Keynote's titles and bulleted text. The contents of the Notes field at the bottom of the OmniOutliner window become speaker notes in Keynote.

The benefit of using OmniOutliner, however, is that it has many features for organizing ideas that Keynote's outliner lacks. For example, OmniOutliner allows you to sort topics, and lets you move topics around with more freedom than Keynote allows.

OmniOutliner can import Keynote files to create outlines, and export its outlines as Keynote presentations.

Best of all, if you've bought a Mac recently, you may already have OmniOutliner. It has been bundled with the G5 tower machines and PowerBooks for some time. If you don't have the program, you can download a free trial, and purchase it online for $39.95.

It's beyond the scope of this chapter to show how to create and work with outlines in OmniOutliner, but I'll show you how to get information back and forth between the program and Keynote.

Exporting outlines to Keynote

After you've created an outline in Omni Outliner, you'll need to check a few settings before you export. You can choose the Keynote theme you want OmniOutliner to use for the export in OmniOutliner's preferences. If you'll just change the theme once you get the outline into Keynote, start with step 7, below.

To export an outline to Keynote

1.	In OmniOutliner, open the outline you wish to export.
2.	Choose OmniOutliner > Preferences, then click the Keynote Export tab. The Keynote Export Preferences appear ( Figure 2.10 ). Figure 2.10. Set the theme that you want for the new Keynote presentation in OmniOutliner's preferences. You can also choose how rows in OmniOutliner map to Keynote slide masters.
3.	To change the theme that OmniOutliner will use for its export, click the Choose Theme button. A theme dialog, resembling the Theme Chooser in Keynote, will slide down from the top of the Preferences window.
4.	Select the theme that you want, choose the presentation size from the pop-up menu, then click Choose Theme.
5.	Back in the Keynote Export Preferences window, choose the master slides you want to use from the pop-up menus . Rows in OmniOutliner can be mapped to specific slide masters in the theme that you chose.
6.	Close the Preferences window.
7.	Choose File > Export. The Export sheet appears ( Figure 2.11 ). Figure 2.11. Navigate to where you want to put the exported outline.
8.	From the File Format pop-up menu, make sure that Apple Keynote is selected.
9.	Navigate to where you want to save the new Keynote presentation, then click Save. OmniOutliner exports the file.

Importing Keynote presentations

It's a snap to import Keynote presentations into OmniOutliner. Since OmniOutliner understands how to read Keynote files, you just open the presentation in OmniOutliner.

To import a presentation

1.	In OmniOutliner, choose File > Open.
2.	Navigate to the Keynote file you want to import.
3.	Click Open. The Keynote file is imported, and opens as an outline.

Tip

• With OmniOutliner 3.0.3 (current at press time), you can't go back and forth between Keynote and OmniOutliner. If you do, you will lose all the styles that you have applied in Keynote. It's best to use OmniOutliner to write the text of your presentation, and once you've exported it to Keynote, make further changes in Keynote.