Apple IWork Keynote Is A Joke For Windows Users

I downloaded a presentation made with Apple’s IWork Keynote and since I’m running windows, I can’t even find a single tool to open this file.

Apple created their own xml format called APXL, but so what? I know Mac users will brag how great their presentations looks like when they created them in iWorks, but who cares? You can only serve a small community (sometimes, maybe only yourself!).

There are in fact options to export them into ppt, pps, or QT, but there might be a chance where the presentation won’t look nice in Windows due to Keynote using so called “Quartz rendering technology” and real “true type fonts”!

Searching the Apple forums return me this:

A Windows-based Keynote viewer would be non-trivial, as a) Keynote uses a “bundle” document format (a Keynote “document” is actually a collection of files) that isn’t recognized by Windows, and so exchanging files would be complicated, and the document would still have to be “exported” in some fashion, and b) Keynote relies on various OS X-specific technologies, such as Quartz rendering, for much of its beautiful appearance, and porting those over to Windows would be extremely difficult.

Besides, Keynote can export as QuickTime with pretty acceptable results, and far more Windows machines are likely to have that already than would ever install a custom viewer for one application.

Yeah, that’s so “right”. But what if the Keynote presentation wasn’t exported into any other Windows compatible formats as a start? Then it sounds like there’s nothing (yes, nothing!) on windows that can view the KeyNote presentation.

The only place for that poor keynote presentation file? It’s in my recycle bin!

Update:
I came across Zamzar which announced that they support convert Apple iWork Keynote files into a variety of different file formats, including PDF, HTML, PNG and more. According to their blog post announcement here, you can now convert Keynote files to:

html – Hypertext Markup Language
ipod – MPEG-4 Video File
jpg – JPEG compliant image
mov – Apple QuickTime Movie
pdf – Portable Document Format
png – Portable Network Graphic
tiff – Tagged image file format

So that might help ease some of the pain for people getting a keynote file and not sure how to open it in Windows.