It’s a good idea to save your presentation often as you work. After you save it for the first time, you can press Command-S to save it quickly while you work, using the same settings each time.

If you’re OS X Lion (v10.7) or later, Keynote auto-saves your presentation frequently while you work, so that you don’t have to worry about losing changes you made if the application closes unexpectedly. But when you press Command-S, a “snapshot” of the presentation’s current state is archived. You can return to this archived version of the presentation if you want to restore an image, setting, or text that you had previously used and have since changed or deleted.

If you’re using OS X Lion or later, you can save a copy of your presentation to iCloud through the iCloud website. And if you’re using OS X Mountain Lion (v10.8) or later, you can save your presentation directly to iCloud from within Keynote.

To save a presentation for the first time:
  1. Choose File > Save, or press Command-S.

  2. In the Save As field, type a name for the presentation.

  3. Choose the folder where you want to save the presentation from the Where pop-up menu.

    If the location you want isn’t visible in the Where pop-up menu, click the disclosure triangle to the right of the Save As field, and then navigate to the location you want to save the presentation.

    If you don’t see the Where pop-up menu, navigate to the location where you want to save the presentation.

  4. If you want the presentation to display a Quick Look in the Finder in Mac OS X v10.5 or later, select “Include preview in document.”

  5. If you want the presentation to be opened using Keynote ’08 or PowerPoint, select “Save copy as” and choose the file format you want.

  6. If you or someone else will open the presentation on another computer, click Advanced Options and set up options that determine what’s copied into your presentation.

    • Copy audio and movies into document:  
      Selecting this checkbox saves audio and video files with the presentation, so the files play if the presentation is opened on another computer. You might want to deselect this checkbox so that the file size is smaller, but media files won’t play on another computer unless you transfer them as well.

      To learn about reducing overall document size when including movies or audio, see Reducing the Size of Media Files. To learn about reducing document size if you’ve used reduced image sizes within the document, see Reducing Image File Sizes.

    • Copy theme images into document:  
      If you don’t select this option and you open the presentation on a computer that doesn’t have the same theme installed (if you created your own theme, for example), the presentation might look different.
  7. Click Save.

    If the presentation was created using an earlier version of Keynote, you’re asked whether to save the presentation in the same format.

To archive a version of a presentation in OS X Lion or OS X Mountain Lion:

Choose File > Save (in Mountain Lion) or File > “Save a Version” (in Lion), or press Command-S.

Archived versions can only be created if you’re using OS X Lion or later. To learn about restoring archived presentation versions, see Finding an Archived Version of a Presentation.

To save your presentation from Keynote to iCloud in OS X Mountain Lion:

With the presentation open, choose File > “Move to,” choose iCloud from the Move pop-up menu, and then click Move.

The presentation is moved from its previous location on your hard disk and saved to iCloud, but you can still open and edit it, even when you’re not connected to the Internet. If you want to save an additional copy of the presentation in another location on your hard disk, first duplicate the presentation, and then move one of the copies to iCloud. To learn more about using iCloud, see Storing Your Presentations in iCloud.

You can generally save Keynote presentations only to computers and servers that use OS X. Keynote is not compatible with Windows servers running Services for Macintosh.

If you plan to share the presentation with others who don’t have Keynote installed on their computers, you can export it for use in another application. To learn about exporting your presentation in other file formats (including QuickTime, PowerPoint, and PDF), see Sharing a Presentation Across Platforms.

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