Keynote export to Powerpoint - blurred charts and text

Question

Level 1

14 points

Keynote export to Powerpoint - blurred charts and text

I'm trying to create a usable copy of a Keynote presentation in Powerpoint but using the export function creates a blurry mess. The keynote deck is quite simple. Plain text, and a few charts that were pasted in from iWork Numbers '09. Ive heard that the charts get converted to bitmaps when you export to a PPT file, so that could be the cause of the blurriness. I exported to a quicktime movie, and that is less blurry, but not perfect. But I really need a workable PPT solution, as most clients use powerpoint and I cant give them a deck made in Keynote.

Any suggestions? I didnt see any preferences for exporting to PPT that made any difference. Is there some special way to bring the charts into keynote from Numbers that would make them less blurry upon conversion?

Please help; incredibly frustrated and feel like a big investment in Keynote is going to go down the drain. Thanks....

MacBook Core 2 Duo 2Ghz, Mac OS X (10.4.10)

Posted on May 25, 2010 11:04 AM

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Answer 1

May 25, 2010 11:17 AM in response to geoffrey2k

I have to convert Keynote to PPT all the time - and unfortunately nothing is simple. All it really does is move content over - you basically need to reformat EVERYTHING. The deal with the charts is that while they may appear to be soft images, they are indeed chart objects. In PPT 07 just double-click the chart and you should get a message asking you to convert the chart, or convert all charts. Here's the ****** part - you either go with the soft chart or you lose all the fancy stuff and it reverts to a flat (but editable) PowerPoint chart. Like I said - you'll be reformatting everything.

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Answer 2

russee

Level 1

5 points

Jun 25, 2010 8:49 AM in response to Presentations_R_Me

Wow, I never realized just how terrible this was until I had to send over a slide to my advisor summarizing my data. The graphs are nearly illegible, I really don't want to spend another hour reformatting 7 graphs. This is a huge disappointment, hope apple listens up and makes these exports truly shareable. Half my lab members use windows and powerpoint, and nearly all conferences only accept powerpoint presentations for oral presentations, the thought of inevitably reformatting 20+ slides for each talk is frightening.

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Answer 3

Kyn Drake

Level 7

21,597 points

Jun 27, 2010 7:54 AM in response to russee

My recommendation to anyone regarding Keynote is that if your main focus is creating and giving live presentations from your own computer, then Keynote will make you stand out from the crowd and can really help to make your presentations memorable.

However, if you need an app that's 100% PowerPoint compatible so that you can easily share documents with others (because they'll be doing the presenting or for training purposes, etc.), then the most PowerPoint compatible presentation out there IS PowerPoint and you'd be doing a disservice to yourself by using anything other that that or at least one of the apps that's trying to be as PowerPoint-like as possible (like OpenOffice).

Another option if you REALLY want or need to use Keynote (because you don't own Office, or don't want to use one of the free alternatives), is to keep your presentation very simple. In this instance, try to convert your charts to flat images before exporting to PowerPoint. This will mean you lose the ability to edit them to make minor changes (and if you're using a patterned background, you may need to change to a plain one). But, even here, if you're forced to keeping your presentations simple AND preparing a slide so that it will look better in PowerPoint, then maybe for your needs, PowerPoint is the best thing.

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