Keynote is amazing, in my experience. I mostly present from my computer, so I don't need to worry about PPT compatibility. I find PPT to be unusable/prehistoric by comparison (when I try to help my wife with it on her computer, which is running a current version).
Glad to know that Pages does a good job as a Word replacement. I do track changes pretty frequently and have wondered how solid the support/translation is for that feature.
The origin of Keynote is supposedly the requirement to create Apple-keynote-ready presentation software that would pass the extremely specific and persnickety Jobsian requirements for aesthetics and attention to detail in an age of Powerpoint dominance. Updates notwithstanding, Keynote shows its age — but all these years on, it still produces great-looking presentations.
Some great applications. I would love to have a direct port of all of them today. Of course I also want the shelf back and I want my menus on the side like NeXT. Oh well.
Keynote was created so Steve could have something that worked and looked the same as Concurrence. He would use his old NeXT to create presentation until Keynote.
Try opening presentation you made a couple of years ago. Might not work. A colleague of mine ran into this, he couldn't open files created with Keynote a couple of years back.
I do recall a changeover around 2009 — was this a presentation more recent than that? I’ve had no problem with this and have used Keynote since it came out (and was a paid application, not free!)
I believe iWork '09 was the final lineup of the original Mac codebase. After that, they basically back-ported the iOS versions to the Mac and from then on had a shared codebase, file format, and feature updates were pretty much in lockstep across Mac and iOS.
My favorite feature of Keynote / Pages is that the equation editor is simply a native LaTeX editor. You have to wonder why Word didn't simply do this in the first place
Glad to know that Pages does a good job as a Word replacement. I do track changes pretty frequently and have wondered how solid the support/translation is for that feature.