By Jason Valalik
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I have been primarily a PC user in my professional career, however in college and as a youth I was an Apple only guy so I am familiar with both platforms. Given that the new Mac Books allow you to use Windows and Mac it was a no brainer for me to move to a Mac. The release of Office 2007 for Windows is a marked improvement over past versions, not just some simple UI changes. I am very impressed with the abilities of the new version of Powerpoint and Excel and the ease-of-use behind the applications.
Both Keynote and Powerpoint have their plusses and ideally you could just smash them together and have the best of both worlds like Van Haggar once said.
Here I am going to focus on Powerpoint and Keynote and how to use both to create great presentations. The nice thing about Powerpoint 2007 is the great smart graphics that are built in that help transform boring text to nice graphics. That is the key differentiator for me at this point. I would say that if you are looking to take your presentations from good to better, Powerpoint2007 is for you. If you are just getting into presentations I would suggest starting with Kenote to get your feet wet, however you will soon realize that many things you would like to do just aren’t possible with Keynote. Apple does a great job of building a presentation program for newbies, but for the power users it will be a bit limiting compared to PPT2007. If you are looking to “WOW” your audience , want to take your presentations from Good to Great, and have the time I would recommend using both tools to convey your message. I will demonstrate how to do this with a simple Keynote Presentation as the final output.

Step 1. Create your deck in Powerpoint2007 with all of the fancy smart graphics and whatever else 2007 has that Keynote does not.
Step 2. Save the Powerpoint document in the 97-2003 versions. This will allow the smart graphics to be saved as images and easily imported into Keynote. If you don’t do this all of the Smart Graphics will be lost
Step 3. Open in Keynote and add the nice transitions and builds that Keynote offers over Powerpoint
Step 4. Save
Step 5. Open and present it through Keynote. Once you add the Keynote animations, etc, the animations won’t be viewable in Powerpoint2007.
Step 6. Sit back and wait for your audience to be Wowed
Think of it as the Mullet of presentations, a little business a little party.
The video is above and the link to the actual document can be found here.
All of my actions are onclick so to see them just open and run it like you would any other presentation.