Problems with Keynote
My wife went out of town for a university conference, and she called me to discuss a problem with Keynote 2.0. She was trying to link to a Word document and but couldn’t. After I took a few minutes to research the problem, I knew that Keynote only lets one link to other iWork documents but not Microsoft Office documents. Needless to say, I was not impressed.
The owner’s manual stated she could link out to a web page, but Keynote would not open the Word document even after it was saved as an .htm file. I asked her to reset her web browser preferences (in Safari) to Internet Explorer, but Keynote would not open the file using IE. It would only use Safari. So, this “so much like Microsoft” proprietary behavior kept running us into an impass. Sometimes, the behavior of the two companies are just not that far apart.
I solved the problem by having her right-click on the .htm file, selecting “Get Info”, and having her tell the Get Info box to use Safari to open the file. AS soon as we did that, the big blue “e” on the file itself changed to the Safari icon. After changing her web browser preferences back to Safari, we were successful at getting the webpage linking to work correctly with Keynote.
My wife likes Keynote because it creates some pretty nice looking slides and “it’s different”. But we’ve had other problems in the past when working with the program and expecting it to handle tasks that PowerPoint takes in stride. If Apple is serious about making Keynote a contender, then it has to make the program both more capable and more interoperable with other programs, documents, and files. Otherwise, Keynote simply will never take off.
I’m recommending to my wife she not use Keynote unless she is generating all the material within the program or the other files she intends to use with it are simple and compatible graphics formats. As for me, I have yet to use Keynote for anything. I can’t afford the time I could be lose due to incompatibilities with PowerPoint; and I run a copy of PowerPoint 2004 on my Macs anyway. No matter how much I may dislike Microsoft, I’ll go with what works.
The owner’s manual stated she could link out to a web page, but Keynote would not open the Word document even after it was saved as an .htm file. I asked her to reset her web browser preferences (in Safari) to Internet Explorer, but Keynote would not open the file using IE. It would only use Safari. So, this “so much like Microsoft” proprietary behavior kept running us into an impass. Sometimes, the behavior of the two companies are just not that far apart.
I solved the problem by having her right-click on the .htm file, selecting “Get Info”, and having her tell the Get Info box to use Safari to open the file. AS soon as we did that, the big blue “e” on the file itself changed to the Safari icon. After changing her web browser preferences back to Safari, we were successful at getting the webpage linking to work correctly with Keynote.
My wife likes Keynote because it creates some pretty nice looking slides and “it’s different”. But we’ve had other problems in the past when working with the program and expecting it to handle tasks that PowerPoint takes in stride. If Apple is serious about making Keynote a contender, then it has to make the program both more capable and more interoperable with other programs, documents, and files. Otherwise, Keynote simply will never take off.
I’m recommending to my wife she not use Keynote unless she is generating all the material within the program or the other files she intends to use with it are simple and compatible graphics formats. As for me, I have yet to use Keynote for anything. I can’t afford the time I could be lose due to incompatibilities with PowerPoint; and I run a copy of PowerPoint 2004 on my Macs anyway. No matter how much I may dislike Microsoft, I’ll go with what works.
posted by Andy Foster at
5:38 PM
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