How to convert a Keynote document to a PowerPoint document

All Mac and iOS devices such as iPhone and iPad come  with a suite of office applications pre-installed. This includes Keynote, a presentation software app very similar to PowerPoint, its Microsoft counterpart.

Keynote presentations can easily be viewed on any Apple hardware, but as an application exclusive to Apple platforms, there can be compatibility issues when wanting to share a Keynote document with a Windows user. To avoid these compatibility issues between Mac and Windows, one can save Keynote documents created on Mac as PowerPoint documents that will easily be viewable on Windows.

In this post, we will show you how to save or convert a Keynote document to a PowerPoint document and make sure your presentation can work across both Mac and Windows platforms.

How to convert a Keynote presentation to a PowerPoint presentation on Mac

If you’re working with a .key presentation on your Mac and want to turn it into a .pptx presentation, follow these simple instructions:

1) On your Mac, create a new presentation or open an existing one.

2) Go to File > Export To > PowerPoint…

Export Keynote to Powerpoint on Mac

3) In the window that appears on your screen, you can click on Advanced Options and choose between the .pptx and .ppt formats. If you are saving this presentation to use on a newer Windows computer, which is most likely, select .pptx which is the default option anyway. Click Next to continue.

Choose .ppt or .pptx export format

4) Enter a name of the exported document and select a location where you want to save it to, then click Export to finalize.

Once exported, you will be able to share your newly converted .ppt or .pptx file with any Windows user. Although some animations and fonts might not port over properly from your original Keynote document, the exported file should be mostly compatible with Windows computers.

How to save a Keynote file as a PowerPoint file on iPhone or iPad

The process described above for Mac is virtually the same on iOS, whether you are using an iPhone or iPad:

1) On your iPhone or iPad, open an existing Keynote presentation, or create a new one.

2) Tap on the ” ” ellipsis icon in the upper right corner of the screen.

Convert Keynote to PowerPoint on iPhone

3) Select Export.

4) Choose the PowerPoint format. Note that unlike the file conversion process on Mac, iOS doesn’t let you choose between the .ppt or .pptx file formats as it uses .pptx by default.

Choose PowerPoint format on iPhone

5) Finally, select how you want to share the converted document. You may share it by email or iMessage, but you can also save it to the Files app or any cloud-based storage service such as Dropbox.

As you can see, the conversion process is fairly quick and simple. The best thing is it doesn’t only work for Keynote. For example, you’d follow the same basic instructions if you wanted to save a Pages document as a Word document.