Review: Apple’s Keynote Puts Punch In Your Dog & Pony Shows

One thing is true no matter what you do as part of your small business–you will be making a presentation to somebody at some point. Whether you’re presenting to future clients, customers, future or creditors, you’re going to have to put on a dog and pony show, if you haven’t already several times. And that’s where Apple’s Keynote app steps in to give you some help with your presentation.

Keynote allows you to design presentations wholly from your various Apple devices; this is geared to work with iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, and you can use a variety of tools to assemble presentations. It’s a lot like PowerPoint–you can actually edit PowerPoint presentations on this app–and you can even forward your presentations to iCloud, so any concerns about not having your presentation on hand where ever you need it to be are strictly in the past. Better yet, you can actually hook your iDevice of choice up to a projector or external display and show that presentation you’ve worked so hard to put up in the first place.

There is a pretty substantial learning curve with this one, I found, though that’s going to vary from person to person. And, you’ll have to consider that it costs ten bucks for the full package. That may be more than you want to shell out for the mobile version of PowerPoint, and when you consider that OpenOffice has its own presentation software for the low price of free, you may not want to drop ten bucks on a software package whose primary advantage is portability.

Keynote cannot be called a bad app, and you’ll probably get plenty of use out of it. The thing is that you can probably do better with the current alternatives, and do much of what Keynote does with a variety of other already available products. Whether or not you’ll want to stick with Keynote depends largely on how much time you spend on iOS hardware. If you do, then yes, it’s a great idea to have your presentation software close to hand, and a doubly good idea if you favor an iPad for your primary mobile hardware. But if you work more with a laptop, then stick with OpenOffice or one of the many other options out there.

Related keywords: presentation software, Apple, OpenOffice, iTunes