Apple Keynote for Mac

Compatibility: which Macs it runs on

Version 15.3.1 requires macOS 15.6 or later. It runs on any Mac with Apple silicon and on Intel-based Macs that support that system version. The app is not available on older releases of macOS, so a recent system is the fixed entry point.

Can I open PowerPoint files in Keynote?

Yes. The app imports and edits Microsoft PowerPoint presentations directly, preserving most formatting. You can also export your work back to PowerPoint, or to PDF, HTML, movie files and image formats.

What graphic tools does it include?

Keynote offers built-in masking and instant background removal, so you can shape images without leaving the slide. The Magic Move transition creates fluid motion between slides that share common objects, and the latest version adds shift, radial wipe and character blur transitions.

Rehearsing on device: Vision Pro spaces and iPad annotation

On Apple Vision Pro, Keynote supports practice sessions in Conference Room and Cinema immersive spaces. On iPad, you can annotate slides with Apple Pencil or a finger while presenting.

New transitions: shift, radial wipe and character blur

The additions in version 15.3.1 may read as quiet refinements, but they alter the rhythm of building a deck. The three new transitions — shift, radial wipe and character blur — are not merely decorative. Shift pushes a slide aside along a chosen axis with a physical weight that suits technical walkthroughs and process diagrams. Radial wipe opens from a point you can set: useful when you want the eye to follow a specific detail across two consecutive frames. Character blur, the most delicate of the three, softens text into a mist before the next slide resolves. Used sparingly, it gives section breaks a pause that fades rather than cuts.

Performance improvements, as always with point releases, are harder to point at but easy to feel. The canvas redraws faster when you drag a large image from the Content Hub, and the in-app image replacement feature now works with fewer steps: you select an image, click the replacement button from the sidebar, and the new asset inherits the mask, frame and shadow of the old one. Re-theming a deck with fresh photography no longer means rebuilding crops one by one.

Last‑minute microscopy images: building a symposium deck

Consider a university researcher preparing a keynote for a medical symposium. She has twenty minutes on stage, forty slides, and a folder of microscopy images that arrived from the lab at nine in the evening. Before the session, she opens the deck on a MacBook Pro. Two slides still carry placeholder charts. She drags the replacement images from the Content Hub directly onto the old placeholders: the masks snap into place, the drop shadows hold. She runs through the presenter display rehearsal while her notes sit on the iPad beside the laptop. The radial wipe transition now bridges a section where a protein structure must expand across three slides; the wipe origin is set to the active site of the molecule, so the audience’s gaze travels with the data. She annotates one slide with a finger on the iPad during an informal run-through in the green room — a reminder to pause there — and the mark appears on the laptop screen seconds later. By the time the morning session begins, the deck has been refined without a single export to PowerPoint, and the only thing left to manage is the clicker.

How Keynote compares with similar Mac apps

Microsoft PowerPoint remains the reference for collaborative corporate decks and for teams that live inside SharePoint and Teams. Its presenter coach and Designer pane have grown more assertive in recent releases, suggesting layouts and pacing tips. Keynote, by contrast, stays out of your way. Its type-handling and motion model are tighter, and the cinema-mode rehearsal on Vision Pro has no parallel on the Microsoft side, but PowerPoint answers when the brief is "forty people must co-edit this by Thursday."

Canva is the browser-first cousin. Its template library is enormous, and it excels when a slide needs to feel like a social-media graphic — bold, branded, immediately sharable. Keynote’s advantage is offline reliability and the precision of its object inspector: every shadow angle, every text inset is numeric and repeatable. Canva feels quick; Keynote feels deliberate.

Deckset and Slideas appeal to the Markdown-writing crowd — presentations that render from plain text. They produce clean, typographic decks with minimal effort. Keynote does not read Markdown, but it rewards the same audience once they switch to building custom masters. The difference is that Keynote lets you nudge every element by a single pixel, whereas the Markdown apps trade that control for speed.

First days: practical suggestions

A short list of habits worth forming in the week after installing:

• Build one custom theme master before you need it. Open a blank document, edit the slide masters under View > Edit Master Slides, and save the result as a theme file. Your future decks will start from a cleaner place than the stock themes, and the font pairings you actually use will be waiting.
• Learn the shortcut for the Arrange inspector. Pressing Option-Command-I opens the inspector tab you last used; Option-Command-3 jumps straight to Arrange. Most alignment drift gets fixed faster with the keyboard than with the mouse.
• Set up the presenter display once. Connect a second screen, enable Presenter Display under the Play menu, and arrange the panes so your notes, the next slide preview and the timer sit exactly where your eye expects them. Keynote remembers this layout per display, so you only do it once per venue.
• Test Magic Move early. Duplicate a slide, move one object, apply the Magic Move transition. The trick is that both slides must share the same object — a copied slide shares it by default, but a fresh slide does not. Knowing this saves ten minutes of wondering why the dissolve shows instead.
• Drop an image into the Content Hub straight from the Finder. You can drag a folder of images into the Hub and they stay available across all open documents. When a client sends a photo set mid-project, the Hub spares you repeated Finder hunts.

Version 15.3.1 concentrates on polish. A handful of new transitions and builds—shift, radial wipe and character blur among them—give slides a quieter, more cinematic rhythm. Replacing images in a presentation from the Content Hub is now simpler, which saves time when swapping placeholders for final artwork. The update also includes the usual round of bug fixes and performance refinements.

• macOS 15.6 or later
• Apple silicon or Intel Mac