Chapter 4. Getting the Type Right

In Chapter 2, I strongly suggested that you write most of your presentation in the Keynote Outline view, or in an external outline program, such as OmniOutliner. I'm not backing off from that advice; focusing on your presentation's text, rather than the text on your slides, will lead you to write better presentations.

But sooner or later, you will need to work with the text on your slides, and that's what this chapter is all about. For this chapter, at least, I'll assume that you'll be entering text directly onto slides.

Keynote showcases Mac OS X's superior text handling, layout, and display abilities (not surprising, since it is from Apple), and you've got a tremendous amount of control over the appearance and style of text within Keynote. These terrific text capabilities help set Keynote presentations apart from presentations created in Microsoft PowerPoint.

In this chapter, you'll learn how to enter text on slides; style that text as you wish; change the alignment and spacing of text; work with indents and tabs on slides; save time when you're setting text styles; and avoid embarrassing spelling errors.