PowerPoint vs Keynote

I was recently helping a friend make the all-important jump from PC land to MacWorld when she asked, “What about PowerPoint?” Like me she is a marketing professional, and like me she spends a significant percentage of her time presenting stuff.

It was a fair question, and for once I was at a loss for a quick and snappy answer. I used PowerPoint full time on my Mac until the iPad, then in the early days before Keynote for the iPad was .pptx compatible I moved to Keynote. This allowed me to work across both devices seamlessly. Whilst there are still a number of issues exporting Keynote presentations into PowerPoint, it is now at least possible.

So which presentation platform rules the roost?

Opening Moves
On opening you are offered a selection of templates (Theme Chooser and PowerPoint Presentation Gallery) from both platforms, there isn’t a lot to choose between them and both options cater for the professional, creative and quirky among us. At a pinch I would push Keynote just ahead of PowerPoint, although the later does allow you to select from a number of colour pallets and easily open recent presentations.

Starting Work
Once you have selected the theme both products present an opening slide and prompt for your presentation title. Keynote is a no fuss full screen layout, which is easy to manage, even on my small MacBook Air. PowerPoint launches you into a split screen (sorter, notes, presentation) option, which can seem more confusing. That said, it is simple to adjust the view on both products to produce a similar user experience.

Getting Creative
Inserting an image is straight forwards with PowerPoint, just click on the image icon in the presentation template or from the file menu click insert / Photo. Keynote is less intuitive and will leave you scratching your head looking for a sign. You can use the media browser from the tool bar and drag in your image or the very non-intuitive Insert / Choose file menu option.

Both tools allow a reasonable amount of creativity with text manipulation, shapes, backgrounds and colours with Keynote also providing some lovely 3d Graphs. However, if you are coming to Keynote from PowerPoint you will get frustrated. Even something trivial like removing a bullet can seem impossible without significant exploration. That said, you could achieve more or less anything that takes your fancy, you just need the patience to learn how to use the tool. Once you take the pain and learn how to do things Keynotes way life gets much easier. Coming at it the other way should cause few problems as the majority of PowerPoint menu items are fairly self-explanatory and deal with concepts already well understood.

Animation
Again, both products handle animation well but PowerPoint just feels more intuitive. It does have more options available, which to some could be a disadvantage but it delivers complex animations without huge effort.

The big pitch
Both products handle rehearsing and recording presentations well and here I would turn to Keynote if given a choice, simply because it is so simple.

Summary
If you were to score both products across all areas, and assuming you could find someone without exposure to either MS Office or Apple products to run the tests (surely they don’t exist?) I think PowerPoint would come out on top, but narrowly. Keynote shouldn’t be considered to be a poor cousin, it does everything you need it to, and quite capably at that. It’s just not quite so intuitively in some areas.

The big decider though is cost. The difference in price is quite simply astronomical. PowerPoint cannot justify the extra cost for the difference in functionality.

Read More

I also wrote this post about Pages vs Word some time ago. Surprisingly it is one of the most visited pages on my blog!