How to convert Keynote presentation to PowerPoint, w/o losing formating?

when I export to Powerpoint and then try to run the presentation on my Windows XP (work) PC, the presentation is misconfigured with fonts running off the screen and picures misaligned. Animations also seem inconsistent.

Why in the wide, wide wonderful world would you want to prepare a presentation with the particular appearance you want in a particular application and then proceed to complain that you cannot have that particular appearance in another application?

If what you want is to preserve appearance, then use an application-independent portable page description model. There is one built into Mac OS X. It's called the Adobe Portable Document Format and while it has its problems, preserving appearance is not one of those problems.

The whole idea these days is NOT to have to buy Microsoft Office in order to interchange digital documents. Instead of everyone buying Microsoft Office, everyone selects an intermediate and application-independent format for interchange. ISO has published two such sets, one set for content interchange (ODF and OOXML) and one set for appearance interchange (PDF). ECMA is working on a second appearance interchange format (XPS).

Acrobat in the free Windows version will image your PDF presentation.

/hh

Would the PDF format You mention save and display transitions and Custom Animation?

What is possible in PDF is one thing and what is possible with the PDF support in Apple Mac OS X and Apple Keynote is another. If porous memory serves (at this point in the evening it is pretty porous) transitions have been supported since Acrobat 2 Exchange in September 1994. But this is the kind of PDF enhancement that Adobe would in all likelihood not like to see Apple offer for free in Apple Mac OS X and Apple iWork, so I would be surprised if transitions turned up and still more surprised if it turned up they had already turned up in the present iteration of Mac OS X.

If I sound a bit stiff upper lipped, it is because I positively loathe presentations brimming with transitions and animations and clip art and absolutely awful typography. Give me a simple and strong typographic layout with plenty of white space to separate the points, with three points per page, and perhaps with one and only effect that is constantly and that makes the presentation stand out from other presentations, but confronted with people piling effect upon effect upon effect makes me want to do truly terrible things -:).

/hh

Compatibility is going to be limited between iWork and Office. There are even compatibility issues between the latest two Mac versions of Office, the latest two Windows versions of Office, and any combination thereof. So, even if you have a great conversion that works right on one version of Office, it may still mess up on another.

I would recommend testing out various features of Keynote, finding the ones that convert well and shying away from those that don't. Also, use only the fonts/styles that are also available in Office. I have faith that there is a core set of features that convert well. I haven't yet made the switch to Keynote so I don't know from experience (yet).

Good luck.

Keynote can Export PDFs but most builds are rendered useless. Share Menu> Export (kn09). Once in PDF a program like Acrobat Pro can add page transitions (15) however most of them are very dated.