Creating Presentation Handouts in Apple Keynote

I'm a recovering PowerPoint user that's been using Apple Keynote for my presentations for about a year. I find it much friendlier to graphics and media. It took me a while to figure out how to create B/W six slide / page handouts that I could easily PDF to clients. Thought I'd pass it along. If you have any more suggestions, let me know! 

PS. I use the Mac native pdf creation tools (too cheap to buy Adobe Acrobat for my Mac). For this illustration I'm working with a 108 slide Keynote presentation with lots of graphics. 

Step 1: I open my Keynote handout presentation. I select File/ Print. Keynote defaults to Keynote in drop down box - I select "Layout."

 

Step 2: In the "Pages Per Sheet" box, I choose 6. Note: This "Pages per Sheet" choice doesn't appear on the default "Keynote" print screen.

 

Step 3: I click "PDF" button in lower left and chose "Save as PDF" This gives me a color pdf - 6 slides per page. In the sample I'm working on, I have now created a 16 MB PDF file.

Now my goal is to convert to gray scale (for the client to photocopy) and to reduce the file size.

Step 4: Open the newly created PDF  handout in Apple Preview. I choose "File/Save As... "

In the "Quartz Filter"  selection box, I choose "Gray Tone." I save that new gray tone PDF. Nice looking handout, but I have greatly increased the file size. (from 16 to 103 MB). Too big to send to the client!

Step 5: I open the newly created Gray Tone version of the pdf in Preview and do another "Save As..." Just like in step 4. This time in the  "Quartz Filter" selection box, I choose "Reduce File Size." That creates a new PDF with file size reduced from 103 MB to 5.7 MB (Even smaller than 16 MB color PDF I created in step 3)

Since I am usually sending of lots of handouts to multiple clients. I have another blog devoted to distributing them. That way I can email a link to my "Handout Blog"  and let them deal with downloads at their end.

Hope this helps!

Comments

[Erwin]

Peter,

Many thanks for you tips!

I find myself reverting to Powerpoint when I have to produce professional hand-outs, espacially for binders of course material with notes pages.
I did not discover any options in Keynote to set page margins (!), header and footers the size of the slide versus the notes area, a.o. for notes pages.
Also, I found that when choosing the option to remove backgrounds, light (white) objects are not printed black and disappear.

Did you find any work-arounds for these limitations of KeyNote w.r.t producing notes pages? I.e. exporting the slides + notes to Pages ????

Erwin

[Peter Pappas]

Hi Erwin,

Thanks for your reply. Keynote is far from perfect. I have not found any work arounds for the issues you raise. You can make the Keynote handout as I detail above and then open it in Adobe Acrobat and add headers / footers. But that takes more software. If you come up with any new ideas let me know.

In the meantime there's new version of Keynote just out - be interesting to see if any of these issues are addressed.

Cheers,

Peter