Visuals help the audience retain information, help speakers stay on track with their content, and emphasize certain key points during the speaker’s presentation.

PowerPoint should enhance the presentation and the words of the speaker should stay at the forefront. Presentations should not be so complex that they lose the audience.

When deciding on whether to use Keynote or PowerPoint when designing your presentations consider the following:

Both Keynote and PowerPoint provide opportunity for the slide to be changed to various sizes and they can be changed to various graphic formats such as png and jpeg.

Keynote presentations can be saved as a pdf or video format to be played on Windows. For playing on PCs, you can export Keynote as pdf, PowerPoint presentation or quicktime movie.

Speakers often want to use something visual to emphasize their main points. Cartoons, photos and bar graphs are popular. PowerPoint was generally designed to support text-based presentations and does not support multimedia-heavy presentation as beautifully as Keynote.

With Keynote graphics are imported better as they are automatically scaled to fit into text boxes and shapes. With PowerPoint graphics need to be sized after they are placed on the spreadsheet. Pdf’s can be used in Keynote and PowerPoint as graphics and keep their pdf format.

PowerPoint has a wider variety of shapes or SmartArt that can be placed in the document. However Keynote has a really nice picture frame feature that can be placed around the shape or graphic.

Keynote has an Alpha feature where you can make areas of your presentation or graphics transparent by highlighting the area. This is a unique feature of Keynote. You can get rid of the background of an image, making it look as if the image is actually part of the presentation.

Using the inspector: Keynote has a wider selection of bullets to be used for your presentation than PowerPoint.

Both PowerPoint and Keynote have transition effects. Keynote has a lot more options than PowerPoint: effects like Sparkle, Shimmer, Twist and Anagram. If you want a more professional transition, you can use Magic Move. Keynote’s Magic Move is a powerful transition from one slide to another. With Keynote you can preview your effects before you implement them into your presentation. With PowerPoint you need to implement the transition or animation into your slide show to see how it works.
Keynote surpasses PowerPoint in animation. With Keynote you have the ability to move the object, zoom in and back out, move around the map, and much more. There is a wide range of choices and aspects that you can customize such as the speed of movement, position, size, and opacity. Both PowerPoint and Keynote templates are available for download online.

One of the best features is the Keynote iPad application. You can carry your mobile presentation with you all the time and play the presentation on your iPad. As well, the Remote control application for the iPad and iPhone allow you to present away from your laptop, and select the next slide via your iPod or iPhone.

With Keynote your presentation is automatically backed up in iCloud. With PowerPoint you can use free storage with Live.com.

Yvonne Wu is a certified Professional Virtual Speaker’s Assistant who helps speakers spend more of their time on stage by taking care of the organizational aspects of the speaker’s business. You have a story to tell. Let’s get you out there to tell it! Learn about Yvonne’s services here.