Keynote for Attorneys: Tips to Try This Alternative to PowerPoint for Case Presentation

I just finished reading Walter Isaacson’s remarkable biography of Steve Jobs, which I highly recommend. It’s a great read, and it inspired me to develop this post on how to use Keynote for Macs. Keynote is a program that Steve Jobs demanded his team create for his product unveilings because he was so frustrated with Microsoft’s PowerPoint, which he found useless and would never use.

In my mind, there is simply no question that Keynote is a superior product for many reasons, including: (1) it’s a Mac program, so it’s well integrated with all aspects of the Mac laptops and iPad; (2) it embeds videos in the file itself, unlike PowerPoint, which “links” the videos to the main file—and these links can and do get lost when the file is being copied, often during the stress of trial; (3) Keynote also accepts as video any format that your QuickTime player supports such as MP4 videos, which are better quality than Windows Media; and (4) Keynote also supports very high resolution and much better drawing tools, as well as standard template background designs.

To encourage attorneys to give it a try as an alternative to PowerPoint for presenting your case, I asked Cogent Legal’s associate designer, Anna Reeser, to write the following Keynote tips and tricks. You can purchase the Keynote App for $19.99 from the Apple App Store if you do not already have it. To get started, view a Keynote tutorial on the Apple website, and then try the following steps to create a powerful presentation.