 If you want to be more productive with Keynote, then stick around because I'm going to tell you exactly how you can do that using your Stream Deck. Hello, welcome to Take One Tech. My name's Alec, a recovering perfectionist and a professional geek. Today we're talking about Keynote, an application that I use quite extensively, really, and not just for its intended purpose, which is for creating presentations. I also use it for creating, well, I use it for creating icons for Stream Decks for one thing. I'll leave a link to a video I did all about how to do that up in the top right corner. I also use it to create my overlays and things like that, animated overlays, lower thirds and whatever, for Ecom Live as well. It is a really versatile program and, as I say, I do use it quite heavily. I wanted a way to speed up my workflow a little bit because there are lots of menu items and things like that within Keynote and there are lots of processes or lots of tools, rather, I should say, that I use quite regularly, and so I wanted a way to be able to activate those from my Stream Deck. Let's jump straight away, just jump into Keynote, tripping over my tongue there, and let's have a look at the sorts of things I'm talking about. I've just got a blank slide up here. There's various different things you might want to do, like if you're creating some image or something like that, then you might want to add in a shape, so we need to come up to the top here, click on a shape, maybe we want to add it in a square like this, change the color of it, maybe we want to punch out a hole through the middle. Obviously, this is just totally nonsense and made up random stuff that I'm doing here, but we need to do like that. Then let's say we want to punch that hole out of the middle of that shape in the middle. Then we would need to highlight both shapes, then we would come up to the Format menu, and then Shapes and Lines, and then we'd use this one here, Subtract Shapes, which would subtract the uppermost shape in the layers from the bottom shape. Speaking of uppermost and bottom shape, then if I come over to here and add another couple in, let's say we want something like that, but actually now we don't want that on the top, we want it on the bottom, so we'd need to send it to the back, so we could right-click and then click on Send to Back, and it would go to the back. Then perhaps we want to have some text in there as well, and that text is perhaps a little bit too small, so we maybe want to increase the size so we can just press Command and the plus key to increase the size of the text a little bit. You get the impression I'm just basically making things up totally here, just to show the fact of there are lots of little tools and things like that that you use as you are going about creating whatever it is you're creating, whether it's an icon, a slide, or an overlay, or whatever it happens to be. Then you get into the sort of animation and things like that, so you might want to add an effect to it, and then you want to see the sort of build order of your animation, so you need to click down here to get this. There's lots of different things that, as I say, I just use all of the time. Now, some of these do have built-in shortcuts, so if I come to any menu, as is the case with any Mac application, if you come into any menu, what you'll see is next to a menu item, there is a keyboard shortcut. So for some of these, we've got keyboard shortcuts, but for other ones, like this Shapes and Lines menu, for example, none of these have keyboard shortcuts assigned. So if we were going to be using our Stream Deck to basically activate these different controls, it's fine where there is a keyboard shortcut, but where there isn't one, then we've got a bit of a problem. It's not a big problem. It's easily solved. We need to assign a keyboard shortcut to those menu items, and there are a couple of ways you can do that. You can do that in the Mac system itself, in the system preferences and keyboard settings, but you can also use a free app, which is called Custom Shortcuts, which I actually added a video about. I'll leave a link to that up into the top right corner, and that basically makes it much easier to assign keyboard shortcuts to specific actions in the menu or to specific menu items. But you can also use keyboard maestro. So that is actually the route that I went in this case, and that's what I'm going to show you today, because what I've done is if I come over to another screen sharing area, this is my Stream Deck, and if I just come into this, this is basically a profile that I've created for Keynote, which has got lots of different functions built into it, and there's actually 40 different functions that I've got there over two pages. So I'm going to show you how I did that, and then I'll give you a way to basically get a copy of this at the end of the video as well. But it is quite simple to set up. A little bit labor-intensive, a little bit time-consuming, perhaps, but there's nothing difficult intrinsically in actually doing it. So that's what I wanted to show you today. So I'll come into keyboard maestro. By the way, if you're not familiar with keyboard maestro, I'll leave a link to a video in the top corner that I did all about keyboard maestro, because if you want to level up your Mac productivity, this is one of the places to start, I would say. It is, you can build up slowly with it, and you can do some pretty amazing things with it, and we're going to be using one of the most simple functions or basic functions that it can offer, but you'll see how this basically is going to make things a lot simpler for us in our productivity with Keynote. So I'm going to come over now to keyboard maestro, and I'll just give you a very brief introduction, because as I say, I've got videos on this already. So here we've got, basically, it's keyboard maestro allows you to create macros, which are little snippets of programming that allow you to control various different things on your Mac, if you will. And we've got a few different groups of macros, down this side, in these folders. In this column, we basically have the actual macros themselves. So this is a little demo group of macros that I created on one of my previous keyboard maestro videos. These are the little macros themselves, which do different things. And then over on this panel here, this is basically what the macro is doing. And some of these are simple, like this one, and some of these are more complex like this one, which basically, once it's triggered, is going to do all of this whole string of different actions. So we want to do something quite simple, which is basically, we just want to trigger one of these menu commands in Keynote. So I'm just going to pop back to Keynote for a moment, and we can give an example of what we might want to do. So let's say we want to use the grab a shape, say I'm always drawing squares. For example, in creating things, which is not too far wrong, actually, because I do tend to create things with graphics, where I'm just sort of building them up out of different components from this little shapes menu here. So we can activate it from there by moving the mouse and dragging it down to the right shape. But we've also got it in here. So if I go into Insert, and then down here we go to Shape, and you can see that down here, we've got a rectangle or a rounded rectangle and all the different sort of standard shapes. So in fact, let's just take a rectangle, shall we? So if we look at where it is in the menu, it is in the Insert menu, and then we come down to Shape, and then it is that rectangle. So basically what we're going to do is in Keyboard Maestro, we're going to have an action which basically triggers that menu command. So I'm going to come down to Keyboard Maestro and I'm going to create a new macro just like this. And let's call this one Rectangle, like that. If I can spell it right, reaching past my microphone, can't type properly. Rectangle, and then I'll just put Keynote just so that we know what it is. Now I'm going to add an action here because we could add a keyboard shortcut, but what I'm actually going to do is ultimately I'm going to link this to my Stream Deck. So we don't actually need to give it a specific trigger like a keyboard shortcut. We can just leave that one blank for now because we'll activate it from within Stream Deck. Next we come down to the action which is what action is going to happen when we trigger this macro. So I'll come down to the new action here. And there's all sorts of things you can do here. And again, I explained it all in the other video. So I'm not going to go into all of the different actions, but specifically what we want to do is just select a menu item. So there is a macro which is in here called select or show menu item. In fact, there it is. It's just highlighted it down there. Select or show a menu item. So I'm going to drag that in there or double click it. So now it is going to show a menu item. And now it defaults to in the front application which is the application, which is obviously the active application. You could leave it like that because presumably you will be using this whilst you have Keynote open. However, just to be sure, you can come down here and just select Keynote from the menu there. So now that is basically going to be looking for menus within Keynote. So what we're going to do here is you can see we've got the menu title and then the menu item. So the menu title in our case would be if we just pop back to Keynote for a moment over here. The menu item would be the menu title would be insert and then the sub menu would be shape and then the actual menu item itself was rectangle, wasn't it? So I'll just come back down to keyboard maestro. But they do make it easier for you because what you can actually do is click on this menu item and it will open up. In fact, let me just make that a bit smaller so you can see. If I click on this menu here, it actually opens up a list of all the applications and we've got Keynote and I can scroll down here for insert. And in fact, that's just cutting that off even more for you. You'll have to excuse my stream deck window open underneath. So you can see I come into this menu and I come down to Keynote, which is the application. And by the way, this will list all the applications that you have open. So if the application you're trying to program isn't open, then you won't be able to do this. So just need to make sure it is actually open in the background. And if this list is too long, you might want to just close down some of your other applications. In fact, I don't know why mail is open while I'm recording, but never mind. So then we come down to here to insert and then we've got shape and then we're still just off the screen. That top one is rectangle. So if I click that now, you can see that that has basically populated this area here. So its menu title is insert, the sub menu was shape and the menu item is rectangle. And that is it. We've now got a keyboard maestro shortcut for a rectangle. Okay, so what we're gonna do now is I'm gonna come over to my stream deck and I'm gonna come into my little demo profile. I don't actually know what's in here. Oh, there we go. I think that was when I was demonstrating pages. But there we go. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add in a keyboard maestro key here. Now I've talked about this before, but there is a keyboard maestro plug-in for the stream deck and you'd be forgiven for thinking that this was the best one to use. However, there is a bit of a better plug-in which you can use to operate the keyboard maestro, to trigger keyboard maestro macros. So there is the keyboard maestro one, but there's also this one, which is under this custom menu, which is called KM Link. And the way that you get this is you come over to your stream deck store just over the top corner here. And this will open up the store, come down to the plugins. It's always slow when I do a demonstration. Lightning fast any other time. And what you want to search for is KM Link. And there it is. And so that's the one that you're looking for. It's got that sort of command symbol. So download that one. And this one makes it really easy to trigger keyboard maestro actions. And all you do is you come into the custom plugins menu here and you've got KM Link. And so you just drag that across. And now what you do is this will come up with a macro, you can give it a title. So if I want to call it rectangle, like that. And then you select a macro. And then you come down to, it's actually got the last modified macro. So if you just created one, then you just need to click on that specific macro. It will come up there. You can see the last modified one. Or you just go down and search for it in the list and you'll find them all in there. So there we go. I've just created that one. And then you'd obviously give it a nice little icon for your button. But now if I come back over to my other screen, we'll get out of this profile for a moment and come back to that one. Lost my way a little bit there. There we go. And now what I need to do is come back into that little demo profile on my stream deck. And if I press that button, so I'm going to press the rectangle button, there we go. It's just put a new rectangle in. I can press it again. We've got another one, press it again. As if by magic, it's just populating this and putting in more and more rectangles and I can press the button. As many times as I want to create as many rectangles as I want. So that means that now, I don't need to go and have a custom shortcut because bear in mind as every keyboard shortcut that you use sort of takes that out of action to be used as a global shortcut for other applications. So just beware of that with using too many keyboard shortcuts. Whereas doing it this way with keyboard maestro means that we are still activating the, where was it here? The shape. The rectangle, but you can see we've not basically tied up any keyboard shortcut. So that is a benefit of doing it this way. Now, wouldn't it be great then if we could have all of these different actions in all of these menus to make us be able to fly through our presentations? Well, fortunately I've got you covered on that because what I did was I went through and if I just bring keyboard maestro back for a moment and then switch to this view, I've actually created a keynote folder and I've got all of the sort of commonly used actions to create slides with and I've created actions for them all. And so they go keynote, align, all these sorts of things. And then what I've done is I've created then a, oh, by the way with keyboard maestro, you can actually export. So if you come into, I'll just show you how to do this. If you click on a folder and then you go to export macro group, it exports it as a single file. So then you can basically just share that with somebody else and they would be able to load it into their keyboard maestro. So what I've done is I've actually created a keyboard maestro, sorry, I've created a keynote set of icons which looks something like this. And there's actually 40 of them over two pages of a profile. And then I've also created a profile in the sort of standard size stream deck as well. And I've made these available on the store of my website. So just quickly where to find those. If you go over to takeonetech.io slash store and then you'll find it just there right at the top next to my zoom icon pack which you may be interested in as well. But what I'll do is I'll just run through quickly what icons are there and the functions that they give you in keynote. So let me just come back to keynote for a moment. And there we go. We need to get back to a different scene don't we? There we go. Which was I believe at this one. So I've created a scene now where basically you can see what I'm doing with my stream deck and you can also see the stream deck. You can see my mouse. So I'm going to point to which of the specific icons that I'm using. And then also you'll be able to see on the stream deck the effect that it is having on the slides themselves. So I'll just drag this over this way a little bit and then I'll create a new slide. And you can see what actions I've created basically. So I'm going to come into my keynote profile. That's quite a lot on the screen there having looked at it. So I'll just run through basically what all of these different things are on the stream deck. So we've basically got, in fact, let me just change the color of this just one second. I'll change the color of the slide just so it's something a little bit easier to see what's going on. Change that to gray. So the first one I've got up in the top corner is a square. So that's just going to put a square on the screen. I'll move that over here. Then the next one is a rounded rectangle and circle. Then we've got the triangle, the right-angled triangle and isosceles triangle. Whoops. And that is to play in full screen which I actually don't want. So that next button along was to play the slide show in full screen. So that's this one. But then you might also want to play it in a window which is what I use with the e-cam live. So if I press that one, it's now basically playing the whole scene in a whole slide rather, slide show in the window. The next one along is if you've got different items, then you can lock them. So there is a lock and an unlock. So you can see once they've locked then you can't move them around. So if you want to lock things on screen, that is how you do it. And then you can click on them to unlock them again. So we've got a lock and an unlock button. Next here we've got these nine here basically are alignment tools. So if you've got different shapes like this, there's different ways that you might want to align them. In fact, let me just make them like this. It shows it a little bit better. So if I make a few different shapes like this and then what I want to do is put that one there and this one here and I'll just make these slightly different sizes so that you get the impression of what I'm trying to do. So there's different ways that you might want to align these. First of all, you might want them centered on the vertical axis. So if I just highlight all three, then I've got this button here which centers them on the vertical axis and you can see it's just brought them all into line. You might also, you can see now that basically I've got this one is further away from the middle one than the bottom one is. The gap here is smaller. So you often want to distribute them evenly as well over the vertical axis. So that is where this one down here comes in. We've got this little distribute vertically and now you can see that that has made those all nicely lined up. You've also got the same for horizontal as well. So if I just do the same with these things and let's say they're not quite lined up, you might want to line these up in the horizontal axis. So we've got the same to line up horizontally here with this button. And then you might want to distribute those horizontally as well using that one. So these basically, these nine here are all different alignment things. So just coming back to these three as well, you might want to align them left or right. So those are what these buttons are for here. This one aligns them left and this one will align them right. Whoops, Daisy, I've clicked on the wrong thing there. One second. There we go. There we go. So that button is basically aligning either left or right. Then we've got some for shapes. So I do a lot of things where I need to maybe add shapes together. So here we've got two distinct shapes and maybe one of them might be a different color, for example, just to show that they are distinct shapes. Now, if you want to join shapes together, there are different ways that you can sort of make them into one. You can either unite them so that they become one whole shape that is the sum of basically all of the space that they're currently taking up. And that is this one down here, this icon. So this is the unite tool from the menu. So if I click on that one, I need to make sure I've got both elements selected. And then I click on that one, you can see it's joined them together. And that now is acting entirely as one shape, just as the others were. So you can manipulate that. It is now effectively one entirely new shape. The other thing that you can do is if you've got two shapes like this and you click on both of them, then you can also basically subtract the topmost shape or shapes from the bottom shape. In fact, let me just show you with an example with more than one component. So I'm going to just bring this to the front a minute. So let's say I've got this shape here and then this and this. And then I want to basically just punch out the two blue squares from the yellow one. So then I would use this tool here, which is going to knock those two shapes out. And you can see it's just basically, it's like, imagine it like a cutter, cutting through the bottom shape. So that's now giving us this shape. The next one you can use is if I drag another shape over like this, you might want to only use the part where there is an intersection with another shape. So let's say I bring this here, you'll see what's going to happen in a minute. I want to include only if I come and look down at these, only the part where these two shapes overlap. So if I press that button, when I've got both shapes highlighted, if I press that one, then it's just giving me, left me with the place where they overlap. Or another thing that you might want to do is basically unite two things, but you exclude the place where they overlap. So in that case, I come to here, then you've got this one. So hopefully those icons that I've created are pretty clear as to what they are doing. They sort of symbolize how those different shapes are going to affect each other when you cut them out. The other thing that we've got here is some grouping as well. So you can actually just group shapes together. So if I drag these three here, for example, you might want to group those all together. So if I highlight them all, then there's this little group tool just down here. They are now acting as a group. So it's not the same before as when you unite them and they become one shape. This is still a group of individual shapes. And then we can use the ungroup tool here to ungroup them and then we can move them around again. The other thing that you might want to do is flip things on one or other of their axes. So if you highlight this one and then we come back down to the stream deck, I've got these two buttons here that basically flip the object either in the vertical or the horizontal pane, vertical or horizontal plane, like that. And then also we've got on this page some things to basically order shapes. So you can have things either at the front or the back. So I'll come to that. Let's say we've got these three shapes. So now you can see the blue shape, the blue triangle is behind the yellow shape and the green is behind both of them because it's disappearing behind both. Well, you can bring things either forward by one level or you can make them jump right to the front or right to the back. So also on the stream deck, there's these four along here, which basically either send things forward by one level or backwards by one level or make them, as I say, jump to the front or the back. So if I click on this one, you can see that that is moving forward. And in fact, if you look on this side, you can see how it's moving up through the stack. And if I send it backwards, I can make it move back through the stack as well. And if I press this one, which is going to make it jump right to the front, you'll notice on here, it just jumps immediately right to the front. Or again, I can send it immediately right to the back. And so that is how you can basically manipulate where things are appearing in the stack on the screen. The next one that we've got also is the Instant Alpha. So you can actually do Instant Alpha. I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with how you do that in preview, where you have the little magic wand and it can basically, you can add transparency to pictures. Well, let's say that we were doing one of our professional presentations and we wanted to add an image in, but we needed to use the Instant Alpha tool. Well, if I just drag an image in, then we've also got the magic wand here. And all I need to do is click on the magic wand and then click into the area we want to eliminate and hold and drag. And there we go, click done or click enter. And now we've just removed that background from our image. Next, on the following page of the stream deck, I've basically got a few that are related to text and they're one for animation. So the text one, first of all, if we want to add in a text box, we can do this in here. Normally you would come and drag up this text box from the top of the menu, but I've added in a button to the stream deck. So we just simply click on the button and it will add some text in. Obviously we usually do our editing of text over here, so let's say 300, it's got some large text, but sometimes when you're just sort of fine-tuning it, you want to nudge the size up and down. So we've got these couple of stream deck buttons here to be able to go plus or minus. And as you can see, it's just nudging that size of that text up and down. And you can see it incrementally moving it here as well. Next is the justification of the text. So if I've got some text in here on a couple of lines like that, whoops, another line, I'm not sure that was right. So there we go, we've got some text there. At the moment, you can see that text is centered, but then these are obviously, I'm sure you know what justification of text is. We can either send it to the left, to the right, to the center, or have it justified as well. So those are the text controls that I've added to the stream deck. And then finally, the last thing is, I mentioned before about animation. And one thing I always found with the animation is the build order is something that's quite crucial. You need to know what order things are happening in. If I just add a few random effects to here, and then let me just add a random effect to this one as well. When you've got to different items that I've got animation on them, then you need to come down to this area at the bottom for this build order. And then that is the build order window where you can decide what order the animation is going to happen in. Now, what I always found out, what I found was when I actually ran the animation in a either in window or full screen, whenever I came back to this, this build order window always seemed to have disappeared on me for some reason, and wasn't sort of persistent on the screen. And I often needed to just call it up and didn't want to have to go in to activate it from here. So I've also added a shortcut for the build order in there as well. So that is this one. And if I press that, it just pops up that build order window there. So that is basically a rundown of the icons that I've got in this icon pack. And as I say, it's available on my store for $10. I'll leave a link in the description. And basically, the steps that you would need to take, if I just come over and show you what's actually in the download, then that might make it a little bit easier to understand exactly what you're getting and how much time it's actually going to save you. So first of all, let me come and share this part of the screen. So in the download, there is a zip file. And then once you open the zip file, it's got all 40 of these icons. And they're all, obviously all names, as files have to be. But I've named them with a logical title, which actually is related to obviously the action that they're intended to be used for. So I've got a list of all of the different icons here. And then I've got the action that they are intended for. Obviously, you can use these for other applications if you want for whatever purpose. You need them for. But I've also got here the application menu location as well. So you can see exactly where the menu location is. Because obviously I've set this up to be used with keyboard maestro. But if you wanted to use a, create a custom keyboard shortcut yourself using custom shortcuts, the application that I mentioned that I linked to earlier in the video and in the description, then if you wanted to go and set those up yourself, then you've got this as a kind of like cheat sheet so that you can see exactly which where the menu items are as well. I've then got here the icon file name just so that you know what to look for if you're looking for a specific icon. If you're going to update any Stream Deck icons manually, then you'll be able to see what the file name is. So you know what to look for as well as obviously the actual icon itself. And actually these file names is also, are also what I have called the macros in keyboard maestro as well. So it means that you can see exactly which macro to select if you're going to do any of this manually in your Stream Deck. So aside from the icons though and aside from this little PDF which gives you a list of all the icons, there's also a couple of other files. First of all, there is two profiles. One is for the Stream Deck and one is for the Stream Deck Excel. So on the Stream Deck Excel, which is what I was using, you saw how these are spread over two pages but there in the Stream Deck, they are spread over, I think, four or five pages of one profile. Incidentally, if you haven't updated to the latest version of Stream Deck software, then definitely do that because that enables the pages in profiles. Guess what? I did a video all about the Stream Deck update. I'll leave a link to that up in the top corner and in the description as well. And then the final file that is in the download is here, which is the Keyboard Maestro macro set. So assuming that you are gonna use Keyboard Maestro, the simple two-step process to do this with is, well, actually it's three. If you've downloaded the files, first of all, go into Keyboard Maestro and I'll just show you how to do this. You're gonna go into Keyboard Maestro and then down at the bottom where you've got plus, you're gonna add a folder. In fact, you're not gonna do that. What you're gonna do is you are, in fact, going to import, you're going to import the macros. I've got a confession to make. I had to just press pause on my e-cam live there for a moment. You're gonna import them and what you're gonna need to do for that is to go up to the File menu at the top. In fact, let me switch up to here, shall I? There we go, bring that up here. You're gonna go to File and then you'll go to import macros safely like this and then when you do that, click on that. You want to go to the actual folder where your macro is that you've just downloaded. Click on that one and click on Open and it will basically just import those whole, all of those keynote macros into here. So then you'll have this list of all of these different macros that are gonna be activating all of the different actions within Keynote. So once you've got that open, then what you want to do is just go over to the folder with the download in and basically then you're just gonna double click on the profile that you want so either the Excel or the standard one or if you go over to your stream deck, you can do it from within there. So click on the little cog wheel here at the top and then come to this and then if you click the little down arrow here you can go to import and then there again you can just import your profile. So if you come down to here you'll see your stream deck icon pack is here and then you can select either the Excel keynote profile Excel or keynote profile and then that will import those into your stream deck and then you'll have them all there ready to go and they should just work because they'll be triggering the keyboard maestro triggers. Of course, as I mentioned, do make sure that you've also got that actual action for the KM link installed as well on your stream deck. So once again, the place to find those is at takeonetech.io slash store and that's where you can find the icon pack on there and then also yeah, check out some of my other icon packs if you so wish. So I hope you found that useful and regardless of whether you use my icon packs I hope you can see how it's quite easy with keyboard maestro to actually be able to trigger actions in other menus and this obviously extends not just to keynote but any other application where you want some specific menu item that's maybe hasn't got a keyboard shortcut or something like that, then this is a great way to do it. So I hope you found that useful and if you did find it useful, don't forget to like, subscribe, leave me a message as well because I do love getting messages from you all and if you've got any issues with it, let me know and I'll be sure to try and find a solution for that as well. So that's all for this video but don't go anywhere because there are some more great videos coming up next and I'll leave a link to some of my keyboard maestro videos over on the right hand side. So until the next time, have a great day.