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Exporting as a PDF

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About this lesson

Learn how and why to export a Keynote slideshow to a PDF format.

Exercise files

Download this lesson’s related exercise files.

Exporting as a PDF .key
1 MB
Exporting as a PDF .pdf
2.7 MB

Quick reference

Topic

Learn how and why to export a Keynote slideshow to a PDF format.

When to use

Exporting a Keynote file to a PDF file can be hugely beneficial for sending sensitive information to others in a format that you can predict.

Instructions

Distributing a Keynote file to others in PDF format can be done after a live presentation or in leu of giving a presentation to a live audience.

Two are two ways to convert a Keynote file to a PDF file:

  • Method 1: File > Export To… PDF
  • Method 2: File > Print… select “Save as PDF…” from the PDF drop-down menu

When exporting a Keynote file to PDF using the export tool, we have several options to choose from:

  • include Presenter Notes
  • print each stage of builds
  • image quality (good, better, best)
  • require password to open
  • include skipped slides

If we choose to enable the “print each stage of builds” option, a slide for each build on each slide will show on the resulting PDF document.

Choosing to create our PDF file by using the File > Print… method will give us more control than the export option including the following options:

  • number of slides per page
  • inclusion of slide numbers
  • exclusion of slide background
  • inclusion of the name and date
  • more…

Using a password can greatly increase the level of security for sensitive or confidential Keynote files.

Note: if you lose or forget your password, there’s no way to open the file, so be sure to document your password and/or use a password hint.

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  • 00:04 In some cases it may be a good idea to distribute a Keynote presentation to your
  • 00:09 audience electronically.
  • 00:10 This could be after a presentation that you delivered to a live audience.
  • 00:15 Or it could be in lieu of a live presentation.
  • 00:18 Either way, there are several ways to distribute a slide deck electronically.
  • 00:22 In this lesson, we'll be talking about how to send a PDF version of your slide deck.
  • 00:27 Your initial thoughts might be that sending a PDF version
  • 00:30 of a Keynote file is no big deal and it really is quite simple, but
  • 00:33 there are a few things you should know about before you go down that road.
  • 00:37 Let's take a look.
  • 00:39 Here we have a Keynote presentation that we want to send out to our team by email.
  • 00:44 There are two ways to convert this to PDF file.
  • 00:47 The first is through the Export feature.
  • 00:50 To access this, we will go to File, then Export To, then PDF.
  • 00:57 This will open a dialogue window where we can make several choices depending on our
  • 01:00 needs and preferences.
  • 01:03 The first option is whether we want to include our presenter notes or not.
  • 01:07 We walked through presenter notes in greater detail in a previous lesson, so
  • 01:10 we won't cover that here.
  • 01:11 But this is where we could choose to include those notes.
  • 01:14 In some cases it could be very useful to the audience to include these.
  • 01:18 Especially if the notes contain additional information not contained on the slides.
  • 01:23 The next option is whether we want to print each stage of our builds or not.
  • 01:27 As we discussed in a previous lesson, a build is an animation event.
  • 01:31 If we include three builds on a given slide, and
  • 01:33 we select this option, this will result in four slides.
  • 01:37 The first slide would look as it would look as it would look before the build
  • 01:40 one occurs.
  • 01:41 Then each build would have its own slide.
  • 01:44 Since PDFs usually contain only static data,
  • 01:47 this helps the audience to get a sense for the motion that would be
  • 01:50 contained in the slide without actually seeing it take place.
  • 01:55 The next option we can choose is the quality of the PDF.
  • 01:58 As we move closer to the best option, not only will the quality of the images and
  • 02:02 the text increase, but so will the file size.
  • 02:06 Since some email servers impose attachment size limitations it may be a good idea to
  • 02:11 play with each of these settings to find the right balance of quality and
  • 02:14 file size for your specific needs.
  • 02:17 For larger presentations I usually save two or three different versions of the pdf
  • 02:21 comparing file sizes and quality to see which one works the best.
  • 02:26 With this option we can choose to set a password for our resulting PDF.
  • 02:30 When the recipient to open the PDF, they will be prompted for the password.
  • 02:35 To reduce the risk of forgetting the password,
  • 02:37 we can optionally enter a hint here.
  • 02:40 The last option is to include skipped slides.
  • 02:43 Keynote allows us to mark a slide as skipped, so
  • 02:46 that the slide is not displayed during the presentation.
  • 02:49 This option allows us to include or not include those skipped slides here.
  • 02:54 Once we have made our selections, it's time to save the PDF.
  • 02:57 We do this by clicking next, choosing a location, and giving it a name.
  • 03:02 That's it!
  • 03:04 While these features are great and simple to use,
  • 03:06 in some cases we may want a little more control over the PDF creation process.
  • 03:12 If we go to file, then Print, our standard Print dialogue window appears.
  • 03:17 Here we can customize the look of our resulting printed document,
  • 03:20 including many other options, like the inclusion of slide numbers and
  • 03:24 the exclusion of the slide backgrounds.
  • 03:27 This gives us much more control than the simple export option.
  • 03:32 So if we're talking about PDFs, why am I showing you physical print options?
  • 03:36 Simple.
  • 03:37 You may or may not have noticed that contained within the print
  • 03:39 dialogue window in all applications across OS 10,
  • 03:43 there's an option to print to PDF rather than paper.
  • 03:47 We can access that feature by selecting the PDF drop down list and
  • 03:50 choosing, Save as PDF.
  • 03:54 By this point, our design PDF document should have been well defined by us in
  • 03:58 the previous print dialogue.
  • 04:00 So all we need to do is give the file a name and a location.
  • 04:04 As with before, we also have the option of setting a password.
  • 04:08 However, because we were using a system-wide PDF creation tool,
  • 04:12 we have a little more control here, as well.
  • 04:15 In addition to creating a password to open the PDF file.
  • 04:18 We can also set password requirements for copying content and printing.
  • 04:24 Hopefully, you've learned something new about printing a PDF in this lesson.
  • 04:27 So now, it's time to put what you have learned to practice.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.

Using an iPhone and Apple Watch to Present
04m:37s
Exporting as a Microsoft PowerPoint
03m:54s
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