With new teaching duties I discovered Apple's Keynote presentation software a while ago. Compared to my experiences with Powerpoint, I found Keynote to be a fast, user-friendly and efficient tool to create good-looking presentations. It has all the typical features that you would expect from presentation software, but after having created a few hundred slides I am looking for one feature that appears to be missing: a tool to create a slide library.
I would love to see a way to import all the slides that I ever created for different presentations into one slide library, a central repository for Keynote slides. I googled around for a potential addon or a feature that I was potentially unaware of. On the Apple forums someone asked a similar question, but only a workaround was suggested, not a true solution. For Powerpoint there is apparently a way to maintain slides in a central repository using a Microsoft Office SharePoint server. Seems like a rather heavy-weight solution to me. Probably Apple could come up with a more compact solution?
Some ideas for basic features:
- easily import slides from existing presentations
- tag slides with keywords, organize slides into folders
- assign a certain "weight" to slides according to importance
- a friendly search and filter function
- slide "versioning": keep track of changes
- tight integration with Keynote: make the library accessible and browsable through the inspector or a different sidebar
A few more advanced feature requests:
- multiple presenter notes for each slide, so you can write up different notes for different audiences / languages
- enable selection of older versions of a slide when building a new presentation
- tag slides with a duration estimate, so you immediately have an idea about the total duration of a new presentation
- collaborative slide editing, with user-specific permissions
- a tool to search for similar slides
- a tool to consolidate multiple (almost) identical slides into one
- a Powerpoint slide import function
- make certain regions of a slide "variable": e.g. containing a slide number, chapter title and so on, depending on the presentation that it is imported in
If you have other ideas or if you are aware of existing solutions, feel free to comment...