My friend Luis Suarez twittered the following message to his army of 527 “followers” this morning:

Hummm did I say how much I *loathe* PowerPoint?!?!?! Aaarrrrggggghhhhh stupid thing would not save changes in a preso I’m working on!! :-//

I was focusing on some other part of my computer screen at the time, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean (where it was cold and dark and dreary and rainy) from where Luis was working in Gran Canaria, Spain (where, I suspect, it was warm and sunny, and everyone but him was in a good mood) — and I didn’t notice his message as it scrolled down the window of Twitter messages from the various people I follow. But a few minutes later, I did happen to notice a follow-on tweet from Luis:

That’s it… Enough of it… Moving to Keynote and exporting preso to PDF. Had enough with the PPT hell at work!!

It occurred to me that perhaps this was the first time he was going to use the “export” feature in Apple’s Keynote presentation program in this manner, so I quickly typed the following tweet to him:

With Keynote, you can export each bullet-point “build” as a separate PDF page. Then [you] can use the PDF for a sophisticated preso …

Indeed, it turned out that Luis had not heard of this simple trick; he thanked me for the “hat trick,” as he called it, and suggested that I blog about it. Which, as you can tell, is exactly what I’m doing.

Aside from one’s dislike of Powerpoint, there’s another reason this export-to-PDF feature can be useful: you might be using Keynote and a Mac to create a presentation, but you might nevertheless find yourself forced to use a Windows-Powerpoint platform to present the presentation. That has happened to me several times in the past year, primarily because the conference organizer was understandably reluctant to waste the time that would have been required for six different speakers, during the course of a one-day conference, to “swap” their own computer with the one used for the previous presentation. (Of course, if the conference organizer had used a Mac, and required that all of the speakers do likewise, the problem could have been avoided altogether. But I digress.)

The brute-force solution is to tell Keynote to export your presentation into a Powerpoint format; then you can use the Powerpoint file in either a Mac or a Windows environment, depending on which one they actually use for the conference audio-visual environment. But there’s another, more subtle, problem with this approach: there’s no guarantee that the fonts on your Macintosh are identical to (or even compatible with) the fonts on the Windows platform.

I need to pause for a moment here, and remind the legions of Windows fans that there are … gasp! … more fonts in the world than Arial. Really! Lots, lots more! For example, here’s a random page from one of my presentations, using a “default” font suggested by Keynote:

This font happens to be something called “Marker Felt”, which is available in either “thin” or “wide” format — and while I had never heard of it before, I thought it looked really cool. I don’t know where it comes from, and I don’t know whether it’s available for Windows platforms; but I’d be willing to be a zillion dollars that the typical stripped-down Windows laptop used at a conference site won’t have such a font.

So what to do? Simple: export the whole thing, using one of the options in Keynote, to a PDF file. You can preserve the fonts that way, and you can be 100% certain that even the most brain-dead Windows laptop will have Adobe Acrobat installed.

That all works fine, and the typical presenter need not do anything more. But I can’t stand displaying an entire page of detailed material, with a dozen different bullet points, in one fell swoop to an audience. First, it overwhelms them; second, it tempts them to read ahead of what I’m talking about (e.g., they’re looking at the second bullet point on the page, while I’m still saying something about the first bullet point). And third, it removes whatever dramatic impact you might have wanted to add to the presentation.

Well, you can’t get Adobe Acrobat to mimic all of the dramatic effects available in Keynote (e.g., graphic elements like the little YouTube clips in the slide shown above, which come “whooshing” onto the screen from outer space), but you can at least make the presentation somewhat less primitive than the everything-on-the-page-at-once approach … by simply checking one extra box in the Keynote export command, which says “Print each stage of builds.” I’ve shown it here:

For the slide shown above, this means that Keynote will generate not one PDF page, but rather approximately 15 separate pages — which each page showing the cumulative results of each additional “build” element in the presentation. Admittedly, this can lead to a fairly large export file — but who cares? You can burn it onto a CD, or copy it onto a USB flash disk, and simply give it to the conference organizer without any explanations or apologies. Chances are they won’t even look at it; they’ll simply copy it onto the laptop that contains all of the presentations, and reassure you that it will be visible on the screen when it’s your turn to speak.

When you get called up to the podium to begin your presentation, some helpful assistant will double-click on what he assumes to be your Powerpoint presentation … and the fact that what is really being shown is a Keynote-generated PDF document, presented by Adobe Acrobat, will be a secret that only you know about.

As for everyone else: they’ll be happily seduced into believing that you’re using Powerpoint. But … they will wonder where you got that strange font, and why you’re not willing to use Arial, like the rest of the world …