Opening PowerPoint Documents in Apple iWork's Keynote

PowerPoint to Keynote Slide presentations are tricky to move around between Mac and Windows versions of PowerPoint. So it should be no surprise that you’d lose some of a PowerPoint slideshow when importing it into Keynote. But slide show compatibility problems aren’t consistent, and can really hamper your ability to view the presentation.

Multimedia and slide transitions and builds are a main area of compatibility problems. For embedded movies and audio, QuickTime is the best bet for importing into Keynote and being able to play. Unfortunately, video or audio used in slide builds can interfere with automatic transitions between slides, to the point where you won’t even be able to manually advance to the next slide. The solution is to either remove the automatic transition or remove the multimedia build from the slide.

Keynote does a fairly good job retaining other types of transitions and builds, including a 3-D flip screen transition, and builds with pictures and text bouncing or spinning in.

With text, PowerPoint imports can have the same problems as Word-to-Pages translations, including text overflow problems due to font substitution. If a PowerPoint 2008 presentation contains Word Art, Keynote will retain the typeface if the font is installed in your Mac. Keynote will keep Word Art drop shadows but lose character outlines and multi-color effects.

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Opening Excel Documents in Apple iWork's Numbers

Excel to Numbers Functions will be a major compatibility issue for importing Excel spreadsheets. Numbers ‘08 has about 170 functions, about half as many in Excel 2008. Many of the missing functions are statistical and numeric functions, and Numbers doesn’t have any of Excel’s database functions or Excel’s three-dozen engineering functions. If an Excel spreadsheet contains a function that numbers doesn’t support, Numbers will import only the calculated value of a cell. Numbers will flag these cells with a blue triangle, which you can click to see the Excel function that was deleted.

Numbers also doesn’t support Excel’s ability to password-protect hidden cells and rows. Numbers will translate these as unhidden, but empty cells. The only way to retain the information in these cells is to have the creator of the Excel document remove the password protection.

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Opening Word Documents in Apple iWork's Pages

Word to Pages Many of Word’s features translate well into Pages ‘08. For instance, Word’s track changes feature imports well into Pages, retaining the names of the editors and the dates of the changes. Styles created in Word get moved over, as do most layout items, such tables, footnotes, and graphics. Some of the items may not end up in the same locations as in the original file, but they will get imported.

In cases where Pages doesn’t support a feature in Word, Pages will attempt to convert the item to something else. Pages will translate Word Art from a Word 2008 file into a text box without the curves in the text and without the outlines and drop shadows. Pages doesn’t support text form fields, but will import the text entered into Word forms.

But even when the original file doesn’t include fancy Word features, the resulting Pages document isn’t always an exact replica of the original Word document. A common problem is text spilling over from the end of a page onto another page. This can happen when your Mac doesn’t have the font used in the original document, when Pages will substitute another font that is a slightly larger physical size.

A frustrating issue is that you can still have the text overflow problem even when you have the same font, font size, and line spacing set in Word and Pages. The reason is that Word and Pages define line spacing slightly differently, so that “single spaced” in Pages is slightly larger than in Word, causing a page full of text to spill into a second page.

To fix the issue, redefine the line spacing in both Word and Pages as pixels rather than lines. A setting of 16 pixels is usually equal to 1 line in most fonts. Pixel settings in Word and Pages are the same size, so the imported document will look more like the original.

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