Select, Change, and Save Themes

Dan Wassink 0:01
In this video, we’re going to take a closer look at how we work with themes, and Keynote on the Mac. This includes creating a presentation from a theme pretty simple. We’re also going to look at how we can change a current presentations theme, and how we can save new themes. Let’s take a look at themes and Keynote on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac. So I am in Keynote here, and I want to create a new presentation when we create a new presentation, we create it from a theme. That’s the only way that we can create a presentation is based off of a theme. To do that, we just click on File, and then we go over to New, we have a window that opens up. And from here, I can choose my theme.

Over on the left we have the different categories. And then we have our different themes here on the right, we can choose which size right now I’m looking at my wide themes. But if I select this, I can choose Standard as well. So if you know that you’re going to be creating a theme for standard, you want to make sure that you select Standard here first, or vice versa. If you know that you’re going to be creating a presentation for wide screen, what you’ll want to do is select wide here. So I’m going to leave it at wide. And now I’m looking at all of my wide themes here, we do have more themes. Over on the right you’re going to see I’m looking at my bold themes, it looks like I basically have four themes.

But if we go over to the far right, you can see one peeking out here, what I can do is swipe or just click on this arrow here. So we do have more themes here to choose from. So let’s go with photo essay here. All I have to do is just click on it, and then click on Create. Or what I could do is I could double click on it. And it’ll create that presentation my presentation based off of that theme. Now if you want to create just a blank one, you can do that as well. Maybe you don’t want to have it based off of anything, well, then what you’ll do is you’ll go with basic white, or basic black. Those are the blank themes. So I’m going to go with photo, I say here, double click. And now I’m looking at my photo essay.

If we look over on the left, you’re going to see that we have one slides that adds one slide by default. And from here, I can go and start typing. To edit this one slide. Each theme has a number of different slide layouts. If you’re not familiar with slide layouts, I recommend you take a look at my video on slide layouts. They’re very powerful and themes, use them heavily. So when I go up to add slide here, these are all the different slide layouts that this theme has. So I have here quote, I have your photo three up, I have here bullets. And we can go and change or modify these slide layouts. Again, take a look at my video on slide layouts on that. So each theme is going to have its own slide layouts. Now what I recommend doing is making sure that you choose your theme earlier than later.

If you go and select a different theme, halfway through your presentation or creating your presentation, what you’re going to do is have a lot of cleanup work. So you want to really choose your theme early, maybe create a few slides to see how it’s going to look. And then once you select that theme, then you can go and add the rest of your slides. You can change a theme midstream. So let’s say I added a few slides in here. In fact, let’s go ahead and do that. I’m going to go and add a few slides in here. We’ll just go with some text. Oh, there we go. So we have five slides here. And I’m looking at this and so like, I’m not sure this is the right theme I want I want to change this. All you have to do to change your theme is Make sure that you go to document and then under document you’re going to see change theme. From here I select it and then I select the theme.

So let’s say I wanted to change this to feature story. What it’s going to do is change that theme to feature story. And again, you may have to go and make some changes. So you really want to do this earlier than later. Set up a few slides. See if it looks good. And then set your theme. You don’t want to change it after you’ve worked on your slideshow for a while because you are going to have to go and clean it up. Now I talked about this in the slide layouts. But let’s say you want to save a theme you’ve created your slideshow. Now you want to save that as a theme so you can choose it for future slideshows. This is basically what I did with. I’m going to open up recent here we’re going to go to my Keynote class

This is basically what I did with this theme here. I use this theme for all of my classes. So now when I go up to file here and go to new, you’re going to see I can choose my Keynote class. And it’s going to base my presentation off of that theme. I have different slides for.

And I can choose my different slides here. So how do I do that? Well, the first thing you’ll want to do is make sure that you have your slide layout set properly. Again, take a look at my video on slide layouts, they are key to saving themes, because that’s basically what happens when you save a presentation as a theme. It basically saves the slide layouts. So I’m going to go back over to my Keynote presentation or my presentation on Keynote for classes here. So this has a number of different slides in it. When I save this as a theme, let’s go ahead and do that. I go up under file, I go to save theme. I add it to my theme chooser. And now we can see we have my theme here. Basically, what it did is it saved those slide layouts. Remember, I had three slide layouts in that theme. So now when I double click on this, there are my three slide layouts. It doesn’t save the entire presentation. If you want to save the entire presentation, maybe you want to duplicate it or Save As Then what you do is you go up under File, and you’re going to see Save As and duplicate, take a look at my saving video on the difference between Save As and duplicate, not a whole lot of difference. But there is a slight difference save as well ask you to name it and then save it where duplicate will duplicate it. And then you name it afterwards.

Basically the difference between the two. But when you save as or duplicate, it doesn’t actually create a theme, it duplicates the whole slideshow. But when you save it as a theme, what it does is it doesn’t save the actual slides. What it does is it saves the slide layouts. So duplicate saves your entire presentation, where saving as a theme saves your slide layouts, and then you can create your new presentation based on those slide layouts. So that’s how themes work in Keynote on the Mac. Every presentation that you create in Keynote is based off of a theme and there are a number of themes that are available.

When you select your theme, make sure you select the right size. And then once you create your presentation, you want to make sure that you select your theme earlier in the creation process rather than later. If you change it later, you are going to have to clean up a lot of different slides depending on how many slides you have. So you want to do this earlier in the creation process as opposed to later. Also, if you’ve used slide layouts, what you are able to do is save that presentation as a theme. What it’s going to do is save the slide layout. So you can use those same slide layouts in another presentation. It doesn’t save the slides. But what it does do is it saves the slide layouts. So that’s how we work with themes and Keynote on the Mac.