Keynote 6.5.3 and shared master slides

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Keynote 6.5.3 and shared master slides

Imagine a global organization attempting to standardize branding across 100 presentations, each customized for one of 16 different markets. Many of these presentations are upwards of 80 slides. Do the math and figure we've got 128,000 slides to coordinate. It sure would be sweet to link each of the 1600 decks to a common master template file.

The ideal integration would remain live so that, if changes occur to the centrally stored masters, each linked deck would be able to reincorporate them as soon as the re-apply the master formatting.

Can you think of a way to do this?

Nothing in the Keynote UI or help files hints that this is possible. Even searching for the phrase "keynote" at developer.apple.com yields zero results.Key

Keynote-OTHER, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3), Keynote 6.5.3

Posted on May 11, 2015 11:08 AM

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Answer 1

May 12, 2015 4:38 AM in response to courtsongtoo

This work is not a Keynote issue, its a network management concern.

What we do is send an email to specific users containing a link to our download site where they download the required presentation files.

We have over 65,000 users, we can't rely on them to do housekeeping routines such as applying themes or master slides to presentations, they demand a finished end product from us.

My reply is a only brief overview of what is necessary, you need to speak to your IT department manager about this in detail to find out what resources they have available.

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Answer 2

courtsongtoo Author

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May 12, 2015 12:04 PM in response to Gary Scotland

Thank you Gary, but I disagree with your characterization of the question as solely a network management concern. Even if all my presentations were on my mac hard drive, Keynote seems unable to source it's master files or styles from a single external document. All this formatting data needs to be incorporated in each Keynote file, and therefore changes to the formatting need to be applied to every individual file. I'd love for somebody here to prove me wrong!

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Answer 3

May 12, 2015 2:40 PM in response to courtsongtoo

Very much agree with your findings about Scott... it's pretty much his/her way or the highway on view points on how Keynote is used in this forum.

All in all, updating Keynote themes across multiple endpoints is something that can technically be done by your IT administrator. If a theme ever get's updated, the new theme will have to be applied. Something to note is the fact that as long as the master slides have the same titles, then pressing the "Change Theme" button will correlate which master slides get replaced by the new master slides.

If you'd like some more guidance, feel free to reach out on our website at www.thekeynoteguys.com.

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Answer 4

May 13, 2015 1:30 AM in response to courtsongtoo

Keynote seems unable to source it's master files or styles from a single external document.

This can be done using Keynote Theme files, that is straightforward. However your query is about how to distribute the Theme files to "across 100 presentations, each customized for one of 16 different markets. Many of these presentations are upwards of 80 slides. Do the math and figure we've got 128,000 slides to coordinate. It sure would be sweet to link each of the 1600 decks to a common master template file." That can not be done by Keynote, you need a distribution system do do that.

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Answer 5

courtsongtoo Author

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Aug 3, 2015 3:25 PM in response to courtsongtoo

So in summation, Keynote can only apply a theme when that theme is "installed" on the editing user's hard drive in the local themes folder. As long as I solve the distribution problem to get the theme file into the local hard drive, then it's a simple matter to get any open deck on that machine to use the locally installed theme. In other words, Keynote does not support a network source for theme files.

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