This might be a no-brainer to some, but you'd be surprised how many people are truly pleased to find out that they can do this with Keynote. When you're working on a very large presentation, it can be painful to keep track of where each point in the presentation is located in your slide navigator unless you add some sort of navigational hierarchy to your slides. We've seen centered title slides or title/photo combinations used for this purpose - sort of a quick visual indicator for each section - which work to an extent, but fall apart for truly large, multi-hour presentations - especially if you need to make edits minutes beforehand.

Thankfully, Keynote's Slide Navigator has a built in answer, though you may not notice it until you've worked with slide re-organization in the navigator window.

The Test Case

We'll use our own PitchBoards theme for this example - storyboard presentations can get long, and adding this type of organizational grouping can really save the day if you need to move entire scene groups around quickly.

For the purposes of a test case, we'll assume that we're working on a presentation that will break down into 3 scenes, with all required shots for those scenes broken down. Let's also assume that we're working with an average of 7-9 distinct shots per scene here. Quick math indicates that we'll have between 21 & 27 slides set up to accomplish this... not much relatively speaking, but you can see how this can escalate quickly into an unmanageable mess for longer presentations.

 

Figure 1: Which is Which? Without organization, the slides are just stacked one after the other.

 

We start by setting up the basics for Scene 1. We're working with 7 shots for this one, so after we've got the title in place we add the 7 storyboard slides that will comprise Scene 1. Once you've got the first board slide in place, if you copy and paste it 6 times, or simply hit the "New" button each time, you'll end up with a straight list of slides as seen in figure 1.

The first slide for this scene is #3. Slides 4-9 comprise the remainder of the scene, and we'll start Scene 2 on slide #10 - so this is a good point to break from laying out the groundwork and establishing your organization.

You can move the slides one at a time, but you can also group select your slides, which is much faster. Start with the top-most "child" slide (in this case, #4), and then shift-click on the last slide of the group you're creating (in this case #9). With the slides highlighted, click and hold on slide #4, and move your mouse to the right. You should notice a blue, aqua arrow and thin blue line appear underneath slide #3 - when you see that, you can release your mouse button. A black arrow glyph will appear next to slide number 3, and slides 4-9 will be indented underneath #3 - they're now "child" slides of slide #3. (note: you can do this for any slide, grouped or single, but hitting the Tab key as well) Now you can click on the arrow, collapse that group at slide #3, and Scene 1 is packaged into a clean, discrete space - much easier to deal with.

 

3 Steps to Order. Simply select the slides you’d like to nest, and drag or Tab them over. Then you can collapse the group as a whole, and move it around as needed.

 

You can apply this method to multiple levels of nesting as well. If Scene 1 in this case is part of a larger Act 1, you can group select all of your Scene 1 groups and tab/drag them to nest under your first Act 1 slide - two levels deep. Piece of cake. There seems to be no limit to how many levels deep you can organize this way - Keynote certainly doesn't set a limit - so if you're the type who thinks like a structured document, this tip is perfect for you.

If you get in the habit of applying an organizational structure to your presentations - even if you don't think they'll be long at first - you'll start to get a better feel for the overall narrative structure of your presentation... and be much more comfortable with the material when it's time to show it to the world.