Keeping Keynote from Taking Both Screens

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Level 1

37 points

Keeping Keynote from Taking Both Screens

I have an iMac (early 2009, w/Yosemite), and a separate monitor. I want to display my Keynote (version 6.5.2) presentation on the separate monitor and keep control of my iMac screen for running another program. However, once I start the Keynote presentation, the iMac screen is automatically taken over by the Presenter's slides function of Keynote.

I do not need the presenter to show on the iMac. I have our weekly church announcements scrolling as a Keynote presentation on the external monitor, and need to use the iMac screen from controlling our live stream broadcast.

Is there a way to keep Keynote running on the external monitor and not take over the iMac screen?

Thanks for any information..

Posted on Mar 28, 2015 7:04 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Gary Scotland

Level 7

25,856 points

Mar 29, 2015 3:10 AM in response to PastorWynn

When Keynote is in play, no other application will be shown. The work around is to use two computers.

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Answer 2

PastorWynn Author

Level 1

37 points

Mar 29, 2015 11:49 AM in response to Gary Scotland

Well, that's what I was figuring, but was hoping I had missed something? The only other computer I have is a PC, and you can't really call a PC a computer can you? 🙂 Seriously, the PC will not handleour YouTube live broadcast application, and Keynote won't run on a PC.

Thanks for your input.

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Answer 3

Mar 29, 2015 12:43 PM in response to PastorWynn

To utilise the windows machine you could export the Keynote presentation as a PowerPoint (file > export > PowerPoint)

transfer the file to the Windows machine and use PowerPoint viewer to play.

be aware that not every theme and effect will be understood by PowerPoint so keep things simple and test and amend as necessary.

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Answer 4

Apr 2, 2015 1:57 PM in response to PastorWynn

You could export the Keynote announcement loop as a QuickTime movie, and use QuickTime Player in the second display to show the loop.

Set up your presentation as normal, and then export it as a self-playing QuickTime movie. Open the file in QuickTime Player, drag it to your second display, and set it to Loop (Menu View:Loop or Opt-Cmnd-L). Make it full screen and you are off to the races 🙂

Two draw backs

1) Complicated (i.e. lots of transitions and animations) presentations make for very large QuickTime files (I created a 4 slide file, text only, with an animation on each slide and a transition between each: the Keynote file was under 500KB, the QuickTime video was 8.2 MB; you might be able to optimize that a bit by playing with resolution and minimizing animations).

2) Depending on your computer's processing power and RAM, QuickTime movies can be processor intensive to run - playback may be impacted if you are running other apps in the background.

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Answer 5

Apr 2, 2015 11:05 AM in response to Eric Brooks

The same issue with Keynote applies when Quicktime player is in full screen play; other applications are blacked out.

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Answer 6

PastorWynn Author

Level 1

37 points

Apr 2, 2015 1:59 PM in response to Eric Brooks

Thanks. I don't know why I didn't think of that. I'll save it that way and see if it works. It is not a large Keynote presentation, so the ram and processor should not have any issue with it. It is only about 10 slides with no large graphic files. Thanks for the tip.

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