If you're a Mac person and do lots of presentations, you've probably already learned the many benefits of migrating from old-school Microsoft PowerPoint to the slick Keynote presentation application from Apple. It's part of the iWork suite and with very little effort just makes your presentations that much more attractive and polished.

What you might not realize is that there are some very compelling reasons to run it dual-screen rather than the simple, rather retro "mirrored screen" mode when you have a projection system or bigger screen plugged into your computer.

I've made the switch from Microsoft PowerPoint to Apple Keynote, but when I open some of my old presentations, they look terrible and are too small. How can I fix them without redoing the slides one-by-one?

I have a problem: When I give talks, they're way too short, and I have no idea how to make them longer. I have a *lot* of experience and a *ton* of knowledge to share - but (perhaps from being a lawyer, or maybe the style and personality that begat the profession) I am *very* good at saying what I have to say briefly and to the point (and in a way people can understand) - give me an hour to speak, and I'll have 55 minutes left over. Short, succinct, and to the point. That's how I like *everything* - documents, speeches, explanations.

Sooo... what that means is that I'm *very* bad at padding talks to fill in time. Now, generally when I am speaking, my audiences appreciate short-to-the-point speeches. But sponsors and hosts do not. I typically make up for it by padding in lots of Q&A time, and taking lots of questions, and I'm very good at extemporaneously riffing off a question - and fortunately my areas of expertise make for lots of questions. So how do I make presentations that fill the available time slot, whether it be 45 minutes, 90 minutes, or even a half-day?

I read your interesting article on producing effective Powerpoint presentations and one thing you said caught my eye: "slides that contain one word or quote, against a dramatic, colorful background" So, Dave, how do I get a different color background on each slide of a Powerpoint presentation?