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How Do You Do It?

Today, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to make the Mac-based slideshow software Keynote do something that PowerPoint does very easily. 

(If the above sentence doesn't pique your interest, nothing will.)

I switched to Keynote a few years back when I bought my MacBook; Glyn and I have been using it to run our slideshows ever since. For the most part, it's user-friendly, but - like with all computer technology - there's always some little bug or other that gets on your wick. I've lost count of the times a simple task took hours to complete, because some link in the chain wasn't working as it should; if I ever meet the person who devised Apple's infamous colour wheel, I'll punch them square in mush. 

All I wanted was for an MP3 to trigger on one slide and then continue under the following slides as I flick through them. Then, when I realised you can only do this on Keynote if the audio file starts at the beginning of the presentation, I tried to record a segment of the slide show that would skip from one slide to another whilst staying in time with the music. Each time I watched it back, it would be slightly out of sync. In the end I had to preempt the transition between each slide so it stayed in time. Finally, I spent longer than I'd hoped trying to export the recording to QuickTime with the audio intact and then embed the video into another slideshow to be run at tomorrow's Mostly Comedy. The question is, will all this time spent make the resulting material any funnier? The answer is NO. Still, at least I get paid for it.

Hang on a minute...

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