Building Non-Linear Presentations With Keynote

Keynote allows you to add links to text or elements to link to other slides. You can use this to build a presentation that allows you to jump to different slides while presenting, or use as a simple app that can be controlled by others. You can use some settings in Keynote to allow others to look through a presentation on their own.


Video Transcript CLICK TO EXPAND
So you may already be using Keynote to create presentations. When you have a presentation you usually go through it in a linear fashion starting with the first line and continuing all the way through. But you can also make presentations where you can jump around using links. You may use links already to jump to webpages but you can actually use links to jump to other slides. This way you can make a presentation where you can move around freely in the presentation using links or it could be a presentation that somebody else actually controls. You're not presenting it. You're actually just putting it on a computer like a kiosk or something and somebody could actually then control it themselves.

So, for instance, here's a simple presentation with five slides. There's an intro slide and then here is a slide that has three words each linking to one of these three different slides here. So we can insert a link by selecting a word or set of words. Go to Format and say Add Link. You can add a slide link, a webpage link, or email link. We'll do a slide link. You can see there's even a keyboard shortcut for this. Command K. We can now have it go to the Next Slide, Previous Slide, etc, etc., or a Specific slide.

So I can have it go to specifically to slide 3. Then I can do the same thing here. Use Command K and quickly change this to slide 4 and I'll do the same here. Slide 5. Now it will jump to one of these. So if I actually hit Play and I click on this one it jumps to the correct slide. Now you probably want to have it be able to go back to that menu as well. So on this slide here let's add a shape. Let's add a simple arrow. I'm going to reverse the arrow there. Put it at the bottom right or maybe at the top left. Make it smaller. You can add a link to this as well. So you see you can still do Add Link. Command K right there. I'll have it go, in this case, to slide 2. I can actually copy this and paste it here and here on each of these slides. Now when I run this I can jump to a slide and jump back. Another slide and jump back. So that's really handy.

There's some ways to be able to turn this into a kind of interactive app rather than having it be something you have to present. You go to the Document setting. You can set this slide for the presentation to Links Only. So instead of normal where the arrow key and clicking anywhere on the screen will advance to the next one, Links Only means that only the links work. Now if we're going to do that we need to have a link in here else there's no way to advance to the next slide. So we can add, for instance, a shape here. I'll just do an arrow or you can do a piece of text saying you know Begin and I'll make this a thing that goes to slide 2 where I could say the next slide.

Now when I hit Play I can't use the arrow keys to move around at all or click outside anywhere. Clicking here doesn't do anything. Click on this to go to the next slide. I can go here. I can go back. Here and back. You can even set this thing here, Restart Show if Idle for... and set it to a certain amount of time. Say if you have a computer in a lobby, waiting room, or you know anywhere. You can have it that if nobody touches it for say three minutes it automatically jumps back to the intro slide, for instance.

So there's a lot of cool things you can do in Keynote besides just a linear presentation. You can even go all out and make this into a quiz, right, where there's a question and there's three answers. Two of them go a screen that says No Sorry Guess Again with a back arrow that goes back. The third one goes to Correct and maybe an explanation and then maybe a button that takes to you question number two. So all sorts of cool interesting things you can do with just a simple link to another slide.

Related Posts:
Embed Keynote Presentations Into Blog Posts, How Do I Play a YouTube Video During a Keynote Presentation?, Automating Complicated Text Inserts, How Do I Open and Edit Two or More Keynote Presentations At Once?