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This one, I have to admit, was done more for software experience than to promote the mighty Spoon Millionaires, which finished its six night run in Lima, Ohio on August 19th. Also, I lifted the idea from Bishop Allen, a band you probably aren't listening to, but should be. Right now. At this very moment. Go put them on.

It's gone now, but Bishop Allen used to have a PowerPoint presentation on their site that documented...nothing, really. It was all charts and bullet points that served no purpose, really, other than to make you wish you had friends as clever and industrious as the guys in Bishop Allen. I wanted to do the same thing to promote Spoon Millionaires...create a presentation, I mean, not make you wish you had friends as clever and industrious as me. I believe people don't need more than five quality, useful friends, and my slots are filled. Jon's walking on thin ice again, though, so there may be an opening soon. Watch Monster.com.

Of course, I have no interest in messing about with PowerPoint (I don't have it, so that factors in, too), but I'd been looking for a reason to dig into Keynote, and this was it. The angle my co-author, Jim Jividen, and I decided to take was that we'd put together a bogus marketing presentation as if pitched to us by some firm that wanted to promote Spoon Millionaires. The benefit here is that it would allow us to use celebrities without fear of legal repercussion (parody is still legal, but we'll see how much longer that lasts), and it would allow us to tell some fairly offensive jokes under the guise that we don't appreciate them.

Which isn't true, of course. Ain't nothing wrong with offending people with comedy...especially if those people are followers of Ann Coulter.

Anyway, Keynote. As with iWeb, my concern here was that I didn't want to spend a lot of time on it. I had other things to move on to, and just wanted this to quickly fit in with the other ideas we were cooking up. I didn't want to have read the manual or spend hours on trial and error, so this was to be as quick and dirty as they come. Thankfully, Apple was accommodating.

Unlike with my usage of iWeb, I quickly found a template in Keynote that I felt was just right for what I wanted to do. As with iWeb, the process is simple. When you tell the program you want to create a new presentation, it throws up all the available templates. Clicking on one shows the layouts for the different types of pages you can create, so it's fairly simple to determine which one to use. You can't change templates without losing the work you've done to that point, so take your time and get this right the first time.

Once you've selected your template and added a page, inserting your content is a matter of replacing what's there. Apple indicates where to drag your photos, and double clicking on their dummy text allows you to replace it with your own. All type elements remain the same unless you copy and paste from a program that Keynote can work with. I would prefer that Keynote always retained its font elements instead of adapting them from the source material, or at least gave you the option to strip your text of its native formatting when pasting it in. I often found it easier to just retype headers and sub-headers instead of pasting and reformatting.

Pictures were mostly pretty easy to work with, but, as with iWeb, I recommend determining the size of the photos used on your template page and pre-formatting them outside of Keynote. I recognize that not all of you have the desire (or the finances) to work with Photoshop, but if you're going to be creating content with Keynote or iWeb, you owe it to yourself and your readers to purchase and learn to use a good graphics editing program such as Graphic Converter or the forthcoming OS X version of Color It!.

Although inserting graphics into a page that anticipates them is easy enough, I wasn't able to get them to look right in pages that are text only in the template. As you'll see in the Keynote presentation, all of the photos except for one have nice bevelled borders around them. These are on the dark pages that are meant for such layouts (first photo below). I wanted to insert a photo on one lighter page that is meant for mainly text, and I wasn't able to recreate the bevelled effect. Instead, I had to rely on a thick border and a drop shadow, which looks okay, I guess, but doesn't retain the continuity of the other photos (second photo below). I would like to see a later version be smart enough to apply the border effect to all photos that is used as the default border on pages that are ready for them.

To parody the type of marketing presentation you might see in your average conference room, I wrote an introduction, four suggested campaigns and a conclusion. I wasn't entirely happy with the level of comedy, though, as the premise wasn't getting over. I wanted to solve this problem by recording a fake speech and animating the presentation as if it were actually being presented in a board room somewhere. Animating it was easy enough, as Keynote gives you great control over how long each slide stays up and the transition between the slides (most are completely cheesy, but there are some good ones), and it's not hard to either add audio to Keynote or export your Keynote file to a document that can be edited in iMovie (for easier placement of voiceovers). However, due to a microphone issue I didn't want to solve just then, I abandoned that idea and went with Keynote 3's sticky notes feature. As the premise was that Jim and I decided to not go with this marketing proposal, it made sense that we could leave our comments as sticky notes on top of each page, allowing us to did deeper into each joke.

To separate the two voices, Jim's notes where in green, mine in yellow. I used a different typeface for each, too, implying different handwriting. Unfortunately, because you can't assign styles, I had to alter the color and typeface of Jim's notes each time I created one, which got annoying. Also, on one of the slide after exporting, I keep getting a "Token Type Not Recognize" error that I can fix, even if I delete the slide and create it again from scratch.

Speaking of exporting, it was simple enough to save the Keynote presentation as a PDF, then put it online. I'd like a little more control over the file's elements when creating the PDF so I'm not stuck with a 6MB file, so keep in mind the fact that you can't alter graphic file size and such when adding these elements to your presentation.

In the end, the 29 page document took me no more than an hour to create and populate with graphics, charts, sticky notes, etc. Joke revisions, additions and deletions easily took three times as long to complete as it did to create the file, so I was quite impressed. Keynote may not be as powerful as PowerPoint, from what I'm told (it's been too long since I've used to PowerPoint to make a fair comparison), but its ease of use and very attractive but practical templates are yet another indication of what Apple's all about. If you're one of us who gets that, you'll be thrilled with Keynote.

See the Spoon Millionaires Marketing Strategy Keynote Presentation - Rated "M" for Mature by the ESRB (adult language/humor).

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