SLOAN RANGER
Energise your presentations with KeyJnote
WANDA SLOAN
If you are addicted to PowerPoint or if you hate PowerPoint so badly it hurts, you had better have a look at KeyJnote.
The name and the program are just a little geeky. But with about half-an-hour of practise, you can learn how to make PowerPoint-type presentations that will have your bored-of-PowerPoint colleagues sitting up in their seats and maybe even "Ooh-ing" and "Aah-ing" just a bit. Plus it's free and works on Mac and Linux machines as well as Windows.
The actual key to KeyJnote presentation software is that is uses PDFs. So you can make hugely attractive "slides" in a word processor or photo slide show program, say, and have a really good presentation simply by converting it to PDF format.
After that, use KeyJnote to call up that PDF document and run your presentation with your mouse and keyboard.
Now, I admit a bias against PowerPoint. It was a bit of a marvel when it came out, but the problem is, for all the bulk and bloat that Microsoft has piled on, it still really only does one presentation. In the beginning, this was a little boring, and now the only reason it hasn't won a patent as an insomnia cure is that you can't bottle it.
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| KeyJnote can display all pages of your presentation (top), highlight part or all of one slide (left) or spotlight your key point. |
It is fast and simple to use, but so is a motorcycle taxi. It's not that PowerPoint presentations are useless, but rather that they last too long, are almost always boring, and actually encourage the owner to drone on by reading the point-by-point slides instead of using them as a basis for an interesting presentation.
The reason that conferences don't just distribute 20-page executive summaries is that the whole room doesn't have time to absorb them. KeyJnote, on the other hand, lets you flash that well-written, illustrated document up on the screen and highlight the important points like a professional.
These are two advantages. The first is that you can prepare a proper presentation, not just the bullet points and lame effects that everyone else on Earth uses with PowerPoint. The second is that the actual presentation by KeyJnote is, well, just better.
A quick summary, as illustrated by the screen shot which should be around here somewhere: You can show all pages or one page at a time. You can highlight part of a page to discuss a detail of your talk - or shine an actual spotlight on the key highlight you are trying to make.
KeyJnote only works with PDF files (and even then it's a little kludgy; read on) so some readers are wondering how to get from here to there - how to turn that lovely document or graphics show into PDF form. And the answer, these days, is "pretty simply."
There are two major ways to do this. The first is to use the latest version of Microsoft Office, the open source suite OpenOffice.org or the free version of StarOffice through (pack.google.com). All of these let you easily convert your document to PDF format through the "save as" dialogue.
But just as simply and even more universally, you can install a virtual printer driver, which is not nearly as geeky or complicated as it sounds. Here is how it works.
You download and install a printer driver that "installs" a printer called something like "Convert to PDF". After you have written and saved your presentation, click to print it. But instead of sending it to your normal printer, choose to "print" it on your new PDF printer. It will ask for a location and file name to save it, and in a couple of seconds you will have a PDF file that looks exactly like your original document.
There are a number of good PDF virtual printers around. I very much like the one from PrimoPDF. It is completely free as in beer, and totally free of any of the tricks used by some companies to intimidate you into buying their software, such as watermarks or restriction on document length.
Download the software from - here's a surprise - http://www.primopdf.com.
Here is the really bad news. You have to use old-style command-line computing to use KeyJnote. You can open a command window in the KeyJnote folder and start there. Or you can use the Run command.
Either way, you have to command KeyJnote to start, and also direct it to your document. You must run a command, all on one line, usually with quote marks, such as:
"c:\program files\keyjnote\keyjnote.exe" "c:\presentations\important summary.pdf"
Do not panic. The documentation with the software describes this, but also adds a lot of useful (caution: geek word) parameters you can add to the command above to help your presentation.
Once you start your show, almost everything works with a single key stroke or mouse click. Click to the next page for example. Press tab to switch from showing one page to showing them all. Drag the mouse to highlight a section of the page you are discussing and fade the rest of the page into the background. Hit "W" to white-out the whole presentation and give you a whiteboard.
As I say, you should budget about 30 minutes to learn the program and its features, and you might always want to print out a crib sheet. KeyJnote is not as smooth use as PowerPoint, but it sure looks a lot better.
The web site for this rather elegant open source project is informative and has quite a few screenshots to illustrate what it does at keyjnote.sourceforge.net.
Email: wandasloan@gmail.com
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