Lion and Keynote Problems

I am having random crashes in the middle of the keynote presentation. I use it at church and it almost always crashes in the middle of my sermon... Anyway, not sure why this is happening. I don't have the sluggishness or the save issues, just presentation crashing. Not huge just about 250MB per presentation. Crashes between essentially text slides.

On my macpro 2006 (2x core duo w/10g memory) keynote is fine on files with up to 200 slides and some movies and art in size range from 150-600 mb. On my imac (core duo w/4gb memory) keynote is almost useless. The slightest change of a file triggers the beachball for as long as 3-5 minutes. Trying the trick of duplicating the file holds off this nightmare for maybe 5-10 minutes when it eventually pops up again. I have never had backup previous version checked in keynote preferences.

Has anyone here tried this?

1 - open problematic file.

2 - create new file from template chooser

3 - manually copy/paste slides from old file to new file

4 - save new file

All the files I have had problems with started as .key files in an earlier version of keynote (5.0) so I was wondering if the above might work. Since I don't have keynote problems on my macpro w/10 g of memory I can't test this idea right now.

Hi fuzzydog,

I tried. It is the same showing spinning beach ball whenever I paste images and make changes. It freezed also during presentaiton. I do not think that it is not due to the file format or even actual nature of the file or size. It must be a bug in Keynote or incompatibility with Lion.

Only way to avoid or reduce spinning beach ball appearance is not to save the file after duplicating the file. When finishing working on it, you can save. Lion or Keynote is stable enough to modify or make your slides without actually crashing. When you need to present to autience, just duplicate file and do presentation using this. It seem that this is the only work around for now.

Y

I've found that by cleaning out my disk and having 20GB free the issues seem to have disappeared. Haven't had one beach ball since having lots of disk space.

Running on 2.53 GB core duo with 4GB mem.

Can anyone else confirm that by freeing disk space they reduce the crashes?

I have around 200GB free disk space and 8GB RAM and still crashes.

The file size I'm working on is only 5MB. It's stable when it's the only Keynote file open (so far).

If you don't have enough overhead on your disk ALL your omputing will be dog slow. Like etpena the machine on which I have this problem has lots of free space so that is not the issue (400 free gigs out of 500).

I haven't had any major issues. I'm using my new Air with 4 GB Ram. I get an occasional spinning ball but that only lasts a few seconds.

I wonder if the amount of RAM and free disc space has anything to do with it.

I have attempted to do some keynote work on my macpro w/10gig of memory and have the following to report.

Keynote is a bust on this machine as well. Whenever keynote decides to autosave everything freezes for up to a minute. When I merely scroll through a presentation everything freezes for up to a minute. The delays are unpredictable and very tedious. They are shorter in duration than on my imac w/only 4g of memory, but they do interfere with workflow to a substantial degree.

This is not a memory issue.

This is not a full hard disk issue (this is a 1.5 gig disk w/300gig of data).

This is unacceptable and unworkable.

Keynote is almost unusable now.

Thank goodness I kept SL on another machine just in case.

Think 1982 and everything stopping while your machine writes to a floppy drive.

I do agree with all statements mentioned above !!

What amazes me is taken too much time to solve this issues !!!

Truly this is not acceptable !!!

2.66 GHz Intel COre 17

4GB RAM

I also use many presentations in the range of 200MB to 1GB with lots of short video clips.

I created a presentation from start to finish after upgrading to Lion and installing keynote update. When I hit the 200+ MB range I started getting the beach ball occasionally for >5 secs. I then inserted a movie that was approx 400MB in size after which I got the beach ball very frequently for at times 3-4 minutes. I closed out. Restarted and reopened the file and to my dismay I was unable to further edit the document because after any change I got an indefinite beach ball wait. After many force quits and restarts I was finally able to make an edit (I removed the large movie file). Now I can edit it again except if I try to use the "Reduce File Size" feature I get an indefinite beach ball again.

This definitely seems to be related to the autosave feature. Everything else works well. If it was a RAM or space issue then other programs would slow down, but this doesn't happen. My short term solution is to break up large presentations into smaller ones until a patch.

Painful.

This definitely seems to be related to the autosave feature.

I doubt it. My guess is that this thread is due to a hardware incompatibility being exposed by keynote. We use mbp3,1s and imac8,1s with absolutly no problems whatsoever with huge keynotes.

I came across this problem tonight after editing a large presentation under Lion for the first time. I'm convinced it's related to autosave. Here's what worked for me:

Go to the Time Machine preference panel, click on Options, deselect the "Lock documents after last edit" check box, then click Save.

Keynote's behavior seems to be normal now. Hopefully this will work for others, too.

Didn't work here!!!

PainfullllllLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL

I cannot believe this problem has lasted so long.... over 10 days. And still no patch, no suggestions form Apple, no movement. Either they Apple dosen't have the time to fix this, they don't care, or they are unable to correct the problem. I got my first Mac in 1984. This is a classic Apple train wreck. It's unbelievable, and it ranks up there with dumping eWorld... or MobileMe... or iWeb... Those of us who have depended on Keynote for our livelihood must now scamble for alternatives like PowerPoint for the Mac. I hate having to depend on Microsoft but Apple gave me no choice.