How to loop slides within a keynote presentation

This is a feature that is sorely missing in Apple keynote. The ability to create a loop within Keynote. For example you may want have a loop of 4-5 slides at the start of a presentation while people are waiting, and then start the presentation without having to exit and open a new presentation.  Or you may want to have a loop in the middle of a presentation, for example some photos that rotate while someone is singing, and then continue on with the presentation when you are ready.  There is no way of doing this within Keynote itself but here is a workaround that will get you out of trouble.

The way to do this is to make 2 keynote presentations. One has the slides that you want to rotate. The other is your main one.  You need to export the rotating presentation as a QuickTime movie and then import it  into your main Keynote file and tell it to loop. Here’s how to do it step by step.

1.  Create the looping part of the presentation and export it.

Make a  keynote with all the slides  that you want  in the repeating section. Export it as a quicktime movie.

This will save the keynote presentation as a movie.  Strictly speaking, it is not a movie,  it is a collection of still images that automatically advance when you want to.  It is kind of like a self playing keynote presentation wrapped inside a QuickTime movie file.  You can import this keynote movie into another keynote presentation.

2.  Import this looping part back into your main keynote presentation.

Open a new keynote presentation that is your main keynote presentation and insert the QuickTime movie into the new keynote presentation. (You can simply drag the movie into your keynote presentation,  or you can select ‘Insert’, ‘Choose’  and then choose the movie file.)

3.  Tell Keynote to loop the looping part.

Click on the movie in Keynote, then in the Inspector,  in the Movie panel  under repeat select ‘Loop’.

That’s it!

Your main Keynote presentation will play like a normal keynote presentation, but when you come to the movie those slides within the movie will repeat endlessly in a loop until you click.  When you click it will move on to the next slide. This is the way to make a loop of slides within a keynote presentation.

The main downside of this method is that if you want to edit one of the slides in the looped part of the presentation, you need to open the original looped Keynote file, make the changes re-export the file to a movie, and reimport it into the new presentation.