Brief Hands-On Report--Fix for Keynote 3.0 Text-Wrap Bug

While using Apple's new Keynote 3.0, we discovered a fairly serious bug. Keynote 3.0 is one of two applications included in Apple's iWork 6 suite released last month. We have used Keynote to prepare slide presentations since it first came out so we have presentations that were prepared and saved using either Keynote 1.x or Keynote 2.x.

When opened by Keynote 3.0 many, but not all, slide presentations with bulleted text prepared in Keynote 1.x exhibit a severe text-wrap problem. Instead of wrapping to the next line when text reaches the right margin of the text box, the text turns vertically downward, running along the right margin. The bug remains if the presentation is then saved to PowerPoint. If one manually inserts a hard return, then a new bullet is created and the spacing is thrown off, requiring manually deleting the bullet icon and fixing the spacing. This is a tedious job for long presentations.

So far, however, we have not found a slide presentation prepared or saved in Keynote 2.x that has the same issue when opened in Keynote 3.0. Accordingly, the fix is first to open and save Keynote 1.x presentations in Keynote 2.x (ours is at v2.0.2). Then open them in Keynote 3.0 and save again. Of course, this issue would still present a problem for those who skipped updating to version 2.x. Hopefully, Apple will fix this bug permanently in the next update to Keynote 3.0. [Bill Fox]