Black Background Presentation

Welcome to the Forum.

Using the Shapes menu, just create a rectangle, color it black, and enlarge it so that it larger than the screen window. This will give you a totally black background for your slides. Copy this into each slide or set as your Master.

Good luck.

There's no way to change the screen's color, though you could just scale the slides up to fit your screen, to minimize the amount of space around your slides. You could also add a shape to every slide, effectively putting a thin, 1-pixel thick border around your slide, so you can always see where it ends.

Though usually people would consider the current behavior a feature, not a bug. 🙂

If you are simply wanting a starting point to know that you are live with the projector you can click the w button on your keyboard - this will give you a white screen until you begin your presentation at which time the screen will go black. - This old PowerPoint trick works in Keynote as well. Also the b key will make a white slide black.

FYI ... If you want to get rid of the black background in the presentation mode ... Just match the screen resolution to the presentation size.