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Another reason for Mac enthusiasts to cheer: a business application to not only rival Microsoft's PowerPoint, but one that puts PowerPoint for Mac OS X to shame.

Enter Apple's Keynote, with its rich, colourful graphics, slick effects, and the ability to translate PowerPoint documents effortlessly. This software was designed with the business user in mind. It's easy to install, and shockingly simple to use. (It should be noted that PowerPoint is not one of this reviewer's strengths.)

Keynote offers 12 themes (backgrounds) for the presenter to choose from (blackboard, linen book, canvas, etc.) or you can custom design your own using your company's logo/branding.

There are also several fonts, colours, layouts, charts and tables in cinematic quality 2D and 3D transitions to consider.

Once you've settled on the theme, you can choose from 11 pre-built slide templates. Sadly, one still needs to build up the presentation since pre-built templates/layouts don't exist. It would be better for the user to be able to simply drop fresh text into an existing layout, but perhaps this is laziness talking.

Regardless, users can move, resize, rotate and layer graphics and text with pixel-perfect accuracy.

On the downside, the clip art options stink, with precious little to choose from.

Another personal gripe can be attributed to the charts editor section of the software. Designed to take Microsoft Excel text and lay it out quickly via the cut-and-paste mode, it failed to do this as quickly as one would expect. But maybe this is nitpicking.

After all, Keynote does boast a number of special effects which hint of an iDVD or iMovie functionality. They're all totally cool, without being too cool (one must consider one's audience, this is a business app, not Disneyland).

That said, it's fairly easy to add audio or video to your presentation. In doing so, Keynote seemingly takes the boredom out of both preparing presentations and, we venture to guess, being subject to them.

The software comes with a thorough manual, and while there's no e-mail support to speak of, there is a 90-day free telephone help line users can call to work out any difficulties.

It's noteworthy to mention you can't take a Keynote spreadsheet and open it in a PowerPoint application.

System requirements to run Keynote include the Mac OS X v.10.2, 100 MB of hard drive space, a PowerPC G3 processor or better, and 256 MB of RAM as well 8 MB of video memory.

Priced at $159, Keynote is well worth the investment.

Contact: www.apple.ca