Exporting as a Self-Playing Kiosk Slide Deck

Quick reference

• 00:04 Keynote is a great way to effectively communicate information to an audience of
• 00:08 any size by way of a live presentation.
• 00:11 It's also a great way to effectively communicate information to people
• 00:15 in an automated way.
• 00:17 The last time you were in airport,
• 00:18 did you notice the information on screens on the terminal?
• 00:21 These screens contain boarding information,
• 00:23 flight information, weather information for the destination.
• 00:27 Airline information and other information that the flyer may be interested in.
• 00:31 It's all about information for the audience.
• 00:35 In this case, the audience is the typical flyer.
• 00:38 So how do we apply these same thought processes to an office?
• 00:42 If your office has a front lobby, that would be a great place to mount a display
• 00:46 on the wall for visitors to view as they wait for their appointment.
• 00:50 Instead of playing CNBC or CNN,
• 00:52 we can mount a small Mac mini to the back of the display hidden from view,
• 00:57 then use that Mac mini to display a keynote presentation.
• 01:01 This communicates a lot to the visitor.
• 01:03 For me, it communicates style, success, and
• 01:06 the forward thinking nature of the business.
• 01:09 These are all good things to communicate.
• 01:12 Now that we've discussed the why,
• 01:13 let's talk through how to set up a self playing slide deck in Keynote.
• 01:18 Here, we have a Keynote file that I would like to play in an office waiting area.
• 01:22 This file contains images, promotional videos, company information,
• 01:26 and much more.
• 01:28 It could also include things like promotional information for
• 01:31 business partners, advertising for local businesses.
• 01:34 Really anything you want it to contain.
• 01:37 There are two features that we need to apply to this slide deck
• 01:40 in order to effectively turn it into a self playing or kiosk slide desk.
• 01:45 In a previous lesson entitled working with transitions,
• 01:49 we talked about how to add a transition from one slide to the next,
• 01:52 it may be a good idea to review that lesson now.
• 01:56 Since we won’t have a live person to advance the slides in this scenario,
• 01:59 we will want to add an automatic transition through each of our slides.
• 02:04 In this example, we want each slide to be on display for
• 02:07 about six seconds before it advances to the next slide.
• 02:11 We do this by first selecting all slides in our slide deck.
• 02:15 You can either highlight the first slide then, while holding down the Shift key,
• 02:20 select the last slide.
• 02:21 Or you can simply select a random slide, then press Cmd+A, A for
• 02:26 all, this will select all slides.
• 02:31 Now that all slides are selected, let's go to our slide Transition settings.
• 02:36 If we wanted to, we could choose to add an animation effect
• 02:39 to each of the slides by choosing an effect here.
• 02:42 Because all slides are currently selected it would apply this effect
• 02:46 to all slides uniformly.
• 02:48 If you don't want an animation effect we can just leave it set to None.
• 02:53 Next, we need to change the start transition option from On Click to
• 02:58 Automatically.
• 02:59 With it now set to Automatic, we can specify a delay of 6 seconds here.
• 03:05 One thing to keep in mind with this timing option.
• 03:07 This is the delayed time from when the slide is initially opened
• 03:11 not from the time the last build or motion completes.
• 03:14 If a slide contains a 30 second video, for example, and
• 03:18 this is set to 6 seconds, it will play the first 6 seconds of the video then
• 03:22 automatically transition to the next slide, cutting the video short.
• 03:27 In that case, you would want to adjust this slide specifically to account for
• 03:30 the length of the video.
• 03:32 For a 30 second video,
• 03:34 you may want to adjust the delay on that slide to 36 seconds.
• 03:38 That will allow the video to be played, pause for
• 03:41 6 seconds, then transition to the next slide.
• 03:44 The timing is a design choice, so it's completely up to you.
• 03:49 Now that we have our automatic transitions just the way we need them,
• 03:52 we also need to tell Keynote to loop our slideshow.
• 03:55 If we don't, it would play through one time, then stop.
• 03:59 For a kiosk or a front lobby display this wouldn't work.
• 04:04 To loop our slide show, let's click on the Documents button on our toolbar.
• 04:08 This will expose various information about our Keynote file.
• 04:11 Including an option to change the theme.
• 04:15 The two check boxes that I recommend using for
• 04:17 our lobby display is the automatically play upon open, and loop slide show.
• 04:23 With the first option selected,
• 04:25 the slide show will automatically play itself as soon as the file is opened.
• 04:29 If you are using a tool like Apple's Remote Desktop to transfer your files to
• 04:33 the Mac mini for display,
• 04:35 there is an option to automatically open that file once it has been copied.
• 04:39 If that check box is checked and this option is selected, it almost completely
• 04:44 automates the process of copying, opening, and playing the keynote file.
• 04:50 While the first option is an optional option, the second is mandatory.
• 04:54 When the last slide is on display,
• 04:56 this option will tell Keynote to go back to slide one and start over.
• 05:01 When you're ready to end the slide show,
• 05:02 all we need to do is hit the Escape key on the keyboard.
• 05:06 As with other features in Keynote, it's always a great idea to test these features
• 05:10 before deploying them in a live environment.
• 05:13 Give it a try on your own Mac now to see what it looks like.
• 05:16 Now that you see how it works, I bet you already have at least several ways of how
• 05:20 you could use this in your office, or maybe even your home, like I do.

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