Apple Keynote converter

A .key file is a presentation from Apple Keynote, which comes free with every Mac, iPhone and iPad and also runs at iCloud.com. Keynote decks lean on Apple's themes: photographic backgrounds, layered colour fills, Apple fonts and builds that bring objects in one at a time. PowerPoint cannot open a .key file, and neither can Google Slides without a conversion step.

As with Pages, the format changed in 2013. Keynote '09 and earlier stored an XML file (index.apxl) plus the theme images in a zip or package folder; Keynote 6 and later store Apple's binary IWA files, one per slide and master, alongside a preview.jpg of the first slide. Our office engine reads both. Across 17 decks, from Keynote '09 to files last saved by Keynote 14.5 on a Mac or an iPad, every deck opened, and each deck we could count kept its slides in order and at its own size.

Plain decks convert closely: titles, bullets, tables and presenter notes come through as editable PowerPoint objects. Theme-heavy decks are where it drifts. In our tests a parchment background photo was dropped, coloured bands in an infographic printed black, detailed icons simplified into plain shapes, and on one themed slide the theme's sample text ('Type a quote here') appeared next to the real quote. Builds are not carried into PowerPoint at all.

If a deck will be presented in front of people, export it from Keynote, which also runs at iCloud.com in any browser. Converting here is the faster route when you need to read, edit the words, or reuse slides as images on a machine without Keynote.