Keynote for iPad Review: Seriously Lacking

App Name:	Keynote
Platforms:	iPad
Publisher(s):	Apple
Genre(s):	productivity
Release Date:	April 1, 2010
Price:	$9.99

I use Microsoft PowerPoint every week at work. As such, I have a very specific idea of what a good presentation app should bring to it. In reviewing Keynote, the presentation arm of Apple’s iWork for iPad suite, I began with a single question: how well could Keynote work as part of my daily routine? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is “not very well.” Keynote is a gorgeous program marred by some severe flaws.

First, the good: You can make some very, very nice presentations with Keynote. The app’s aesthetic is very different from PowerPoint’s–everything is slicker, more modern, more graphical than the PowerPoint standard, designed more around pictures and charts than text and background elements. All of the formatting options found in the other iWork apps can be found here, as far as creating text and text effects, applying styles, and creating good-looking images.

You’d better have your own graphics, though, or be prepared to make liberal use of Google’s image search, because there’s no built-in clipart. As someone who routinely makes use of those convenient prepackaged images in PowerPoint, I found this to be a significant limitation.

In fact, the whole time I was using Keynote, I felt limited. Yes, it has all the text, graphical, and other formatting elements found in the other iWork apps. But I’m used to my presentation software outclassing my word processor and spreadsheet programs in terms of formatting effects and choices. In a lot of ways, PowerPoint is an extremely creative and artistic program, once you get to know it. So far, Keynote just doesn’t deliver the same user experience. It’s a PowerPoint app with Word -level design tools.

I began to compile a checklist of all the little things missing or lacking. Hyperlinking within a slide? Nope. Embedding audio or video? Nope. Slide notes? Nuh-uh (and it will even strip them out of a file you import). Slide headers and footers? Not that I could find. I couldn’t even find a way to change the color of the slide backgrounds. Ultimately, should a portable app like Keynote carry every option that a full-fledged desktop program should? No. But there still seemed to be so much lacking.

This problem is especially evident when it comes to overall slide management. For one thing, Keynote provides a limited number of nicely predesigned presentation templates. But you can forget about creating your own looks–say, a presentation with your company’s colors and logo on each slide. There’s no way to create a novel slide design nor a master slide to edit; the only way to create a novel look is to format it in slide by slide, and even then you’re limited to the options that Keynote provides.

You really can’t do anything to multiple slides at once, except for grouping them and moving them.You can’t even apply the same slide transition to all slides, apart from selecting and setting each one individually. This lack of presentation-level design and management is a serious flaw. So far as I can tell, there isn’t even a way to create such a slide design master on desktop Keynote and then port it into the app.

Then there is the one major, significant, absolutely fatal flaw in Keynote: it cannot export in PowerPoint format. It can import PowerPoint files–sort-of, if they’re not too fancy–but anything exported from Keynote will be in either Keynote or PDF form.

My job is PC-based. I give PowerPoint presentations nearly every single day. The rooms I present in are PC-based. They have PowerPoint in them. In order for Keynote for iPad to be even remotely useful to me, I need to be able to export in PowerPoint format. I can’t go into each classroom and spend time hoping that I can sync up wireless streaming, or that the system in this or that room will have the right VGA connections, and I sure as heck can’t be crawling around behind the computer to plug things in!

This isn’t just a personal thing. According to the statistics, anything from 80% to more than 90% of all businesses use Microsoft Office as their workplace standard, and the other 10-20% are not all Mac based. In order for Keynote to be at all useful, it needs to be able to port files in a format that the vast majority of us can use, and that format is PowerPoint.

Why PowePoint compatibility wasn’t included here, I simply cannot say. Maybe it was an insurmountable technical issue; maybe its planned for a future update. But until a PowerPoint export feature is available for those vast majority of us who do not also own a Mac, Keynote will remain just a pretty PDF creator on my iPad. And I don’t generally have a need for creating pretty PDFs.

In the end, I have to judge this not only on its standalone merits, but also on its usefulness to the vast majority of people who may want to use it. And that majority will probably need it to export in PowerPoint format before they ever find this app useful. Sure, it can read PowerPoint files, but there are cheaper options for that. Until Keynote can play nice with PowerPoint, it isn’t a useful productivity app for many of us; and until it becomes more fully featured, especially in the terms of creating and applying new and consistent formats across slides, its use as a presentation creator in general is limited.

For now, I cannot recommend Keynote for iPad to anyone who uses PowerPoint in their daily affairs. But I will eagerly be looking out for future updates.

Our score: 2/5 for most users, 3/5 for anyone set up to port and display Keynote files.

Keynote is available for $9.99 in the App Store . (App Store Link)

About the Author

Writer@Large Brian P. Hudson is an educator and freelance writer currently living in Dearborn, MI.

 

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