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I have a client who has asked me if we can distribute electronic copies of a Keynote presentation I prepared for him in "slideshow-only" mode, such that other people can only view (not edit) the presentation and so that they'll always see the animation when they flip through it.

The animation is the biggest sticking point, he is concerned that people will normally just open the file and flip through it in editor mode.

Does anyone know how to accomplish this with a keynote presentation? Bonus points if you also know a good way to share it with Windows users.

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She could export it as a PowerPoint file and rename it to .pps afterwards. But this doesn't offer any protection at all so she is definitively better off in distributing the slides as they are. Anybody can recreate them anyway if they want to copy them, so why bother? – patrix♦ Nov 9 '11 at 11:29

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Use iWork.com embedding  :)

Since January (Keynote 5.0.5), iWork lets you embed your published presentation and play them in Safari (link contains a demo). Follow the instructions there!

Note that not all transitions will be available, so it won't be a “pixel-for-pixel” in all cases, but I guess it's the best alternative we can get, and it will be 100% compatible with Windows (with the limitation that a recent WebKit browser is required).

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Yeah, this is the direction I've ended up going. Not perfect (as the windows people who struggle with opening a presentation and pressing play are typically not going to have chrome or safari), but it works. – Andrew Dec 9 '11 at 14:30
@Andrew If that's what you did and it solved your problem, remember you should accept this answer, so that future users asking the same question directly know it was the thing to do, without needing to read comments :) – MattiSG Dec 10 '11 at 13:04
Right, sorry, spaced out :) – Andrew Dec 13 '11 at 0:43
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There is no way that you can make a keynote read-only. But why not just give them the keynote? As most people would probably just watch the presentation only without editing it. Even if they would want to edit it, they would probably do it after viewing the keynote. The only other option I can think of is to record your keynote through the File-Export, then choose quicktime and export (Edit the options depending on your needs). This would make the audience to view it in a movie file instead of a slideshow mode. Though it might not be the best idea as it wouldn't allow time for the audience to read the things on the slide. (Though you can edit the timing between animations)

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