Presenting with a Mac? Brace yourself.

You might think that the staff of high-tech conferences would have no trouble hooking your Mac laptop up to their projectors. You might be wrong.

Based on my experience at 9 recent technology conferences, I can say this to Mac users:

• Give up right now and convert your Keynote presentation to PowerPoint.
• Put it on a thumb drive.
• Watch the setup people try and fail to get the projector to work with your Mac.
• Wait for the setup people to say, “Can’t you use our PC?”
• Sigh quietly and stick your thumb drive in their PC.

I have the correct video converter. My Macbook Pro has been hooked up without a hitch by some conference teams. But the majority can’t do it for whatever reason. This has been true at talks in Australia, the UK, and the US, so I can’t even blame any particular culture for Mac backwardness.

The quickest way to convert Keynote presentations to PowerPoint

Polish cookies that for some reason I always find in Turkish groceries

Here’s the method I discovered one memorable night in Melbourne when I was told at 5 PM that my talk for the next morning had to be in PowerPoint for simultaneous webcasting. I use a lot of images in my talks, so that meant converting 87 slides.

I knew from experience that fonts, arrows, and changes in opacity didn’t come out of the conversion looking at all good, so after some desperate experimentation fueled by an entire package of Polish cookies, I ended up with the following process, which has served me well ever since.

1. In your Keynote file, don’t use any transitions or animations. They don’t add anything, anyway.
2. Instead of building on one slide, put each build on a separate slide.
3. Use File > Export to export the slides as PNGs. You’ll get a separate PNG for each slide.
4. Open PowerPoint or OpenOffice (I use the latter).
5. Create a new presentation using the same dimensions as the Keynote presentation.
6. Create a lot of empty slides.
7. Drag each PNG from the finder onto an empty slide. The PNG should snap into place.
8. Flip through the slides to check everything.
9. Save it and you’re done.

You lose a little sharpness, but you save a lot of slide-tweaking time. You can go out for a relaxed Indian dinner instead of, say, sitting on the floor in an “artistic” B&B that has no usable tables or chairs, stuffing yourself with Polish sugar while muttering at your laptop and cursing Microsoft.

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