Keynote's charting abilities are decent, but they are hardly complete. For example, Keynote doesn't provide 3-D charts, and lacks many chart types found in other charting programs. Keynote also lacks the ability to create combination charts, which contain more than one chart type. If you need more charting power than Keynote can provide, you'll need to turn to other applications that can create charts. Microsoft Excel has many chart types that Keynote lacks, including 3-D, surface, stock, radar, scatter, bubble, and doughnut charts. Excel gives you control over the transparency of chart objects, which allows you to create some nice effects ( Figure 8.7 ). Because Excel's charting abilities are coupled with a powerful spreadsheet, you can do all of your calculations in Excel, chart your results, dress up the chart using Excel's advanced tools, and paste the finished chart into Keynote. Chartsmith, from Blacksmith (www.blacksmith.com), is a standalone charting application for Mac OS X ( Figure 8.8 ). It creates all of the Keynote chart types, plus many more, such as base-error, histogram, XY, and intensity scatter charts. As a nice bonus, you can export Chartsmith documents in Keynote 1.0 format, making it especially easy to get charts into your presentations (Keynote 2 reads Keynote 1.0 files just fine). You can even select a particular Keynote theme, and Chartsmith will use that theme when it exports. |