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Exporting from Keynote to PowerPoint: the presenter notes, skipped slides, comments and links to check in the .pptx

Last updated: 27 October 2026

This page is for people who build slides in Keynote on a Mac and send them on as PowerPoint files: to a client, to a conference organiser, to colleagues on Windows. It is about what can travel in the file besides the slides. We have not tested a Keynote export for this page, and the format can change with Keynote's versions, so it tells you what to check rather than what you will find. For decks downloaded from Google Slides, see Google Docs, Sheets and Slides downloaded as Office files.

What Apple's guide says about the export

Apple's page Export to PowerPoint or another file format in Keynote on Mac gives the route, File › Export To › PowerPoint, and describes the result in one line: "These files can be opened and edited by Microsoft PowerPoint in .pptx format." It says the export is a copy ("Any changes made to the exported presentation don’t affect the original"), and that "If the original file has a password, it applies to copies exported in PDF, PowerPoint, and Keynote ’09 formats, but you can change or remove it."

For a PDF, the same page names choices about presenter notes, skipped slides and comments: "Select the checkbox next to presenter notes and skipped slides if you want to print them", and "To include comments in the PDF, select the 'Include comments' checkbox." For PowerPoint it names no such choices, and we found no Apple page that says whether presenter notes, skipped slides, comments or the comment authors' names go into the .pptx. Treat each of them as possible.

What a Keynote presentation can hold besides the slides

Presenter notes and skipped slides

Apple's page Add and view presenter notes says notes "can help you recall important points you want to mention during a presentation", and "The notes don’t appear on the slide". Notes written for yourself can hold what you would say but not write: a client's name, a price, a remark about the audience. Hiding the notes area (Hide Presenter Notes) only gives you "a little more room to work on the slide canvas"; the notes stay.

Apple's page Skip or unskip a slide explains what skipping is for: "if you want to keep two versions of a slide but you want to show only one of them." A skipped slide is not played, but it is still in the presentation. If the other version is the one with the old figures, delete it rather than skip it before you export. In PowerPoint, the counterpart is a hidden slide, which anyone can unhide; see speaker notes and hidden slides in PowerPoint.

Comments and the name on them

Apple's page Add and print comments says: "When multiple people are working on a presentation, each person’s comments appear in a unique color and include their author name." Its page Set author name and comment color says the name comes from the Author field in Keynote › Settings › General, and that changing it changes "comments you made previously" as well. In a shared presentation it is different: "the name that appears in comments and in the participant list is the name you use with your Apple Account." A deck you worked on with others in iCloud can carry their names, and yours as your Apple Account shows it. The page adds: "If you stop sharing a presentation, the author name in comments reverts to the author name you set in Keynote settings."

Hiding comments (View › Comments › Hide Comments) only hides them. Delete the comments, and the conversations under them, before you export; the comments page says that deleting a comment with replies "deletes the entire conversation".

Links: the text shown and the address behind it

Apple's page Link to a webpage, email, phone number, or slide has you enter the address in the Link field and, for a text link, the words people see in the Display field: "you may want to show the domain name and not the entire web address." The address in full is what the link opens, so it can go with the link: a page on an internal site, a shared folder's link, a tracking parameter or a draft page. The same applies to an email link (the address in the To field, and the Subject) and a phone link. Click each link and read the address in the link editor before you export; remove a link you do not mean to send, which, the page says, keeps the text and drops the link.

The password

The export page says what to do "If there's a password checkbox": keep the password, change it, or clear "Require password to open" so the copy has none. For the Keynote presentation itself, Apple's page Password-protect a Keynote presentation says that "Adding a password to a presentation encrypts the file." A password-protected .pptx is an encrypted file too: it cannot be checked as a .zip, and ScrubDrop refuses it (below). If you want a password on the copy you send, check a copy exported without one first, then export again with the password, after the same deletions.

After the export: what else to look at

Besides what came from Keynote, the .pptx can have properties of its own: look in docProps/core.xml (title, author, last saved by, dates) and docProps/app.xml, whose Application element, where present, names the program that wrote the file. If you open the .pptx in PowerPoint and save it again, PowerPoint can write details of its own. Microsoft's page Change the author name says PowerPoint sets the Author of new presentations from its User name setting, which "also provides the name and initials that are displayed in comments"; we found no Microsoft page that lists everything PowerPoint changes in a file it did not create, so read the properties again after saving.

On Windows, PowerPoint's Document Inspector checks a presentation for, among other things, comments, document properties, invisible on-slide content, off-slide content, presentation notes and custom XML data (Microsoft's Document Inspector page). Hidden slides are not on that list, so check them yourself. The page also says Document Inspector "cannot remove pictures that are added to the Notes section of a presentation." On a Mac, see Document Inspector on a Mac.

Before you export from Keynote

1. Make a copy of the presentation for sending, and work on the copy.
2. Show presenter notes, and delete the notes of every slide, or the ones you would not show.
3. Show skipped slides, and delete the ones the recipient should not have.
4. Show comments, and delete every comment and conversation.
5. Click each link and check its address; remove the links you do not mean to send.
6. Export with File › Export To › PowerPoint, and decide about the password.

How to check the .pptx

1. Open it in PowerPoint, if you have it: look at the notes under each slide, at hidden slides in the slide sorter, and at the Comments pane.
2. Make a copy of the .pptx, rename it to .zip and unzip it.
3. Look for a ppt/notesSlides folder, and read the notes text in it. Search the slide parts in ppt/slides for show="0".
4. Look for a ppt/comments folder or comment parts, and for ppt/commentAuthors.xml or ppt/authors.xml, and read the names.
5. Open the files in ppt/slides/_rels and read each Target with TargetMode="External": these are the link addresses.
6. Read docProps/core.xml and docProps/app.xml, and open the pictures in ppt/media in a program that shows their details.

What ScrubDrop does

ScrubDrop reads a .pptx in your browser; the file is not uploaded. We have not run it on a Keynote export. It lists what it finds: properties, comments with their authors, speaker notes, hidden slides, objects outside the slide, embedded objects, links to other files, custom XML and tags, image metadata, and the other kinds it supports. For free, one file at a time, it removes the properties (and the preview picture saved with them) and the comments with their author lists. ScrubDrop Pro also removes speaker notes, hidden slides (in a few arrangements, such as a show set to play a range of slides, it refuses and says why), objects outside the slide, embedded objects, links to other files, custom XML and tags, and image metadata in JPEG, PNG, GIF and SVG pictures (pictures in some other formats, such as TIFF, BMP, EMF, WMF, HEIC and WebP, are listed as not checked).

Links to web pages, email addresses and phone numbers are not links to other files: ScrubDrop keeps them, in both versions, because they are part of what the slides do. Check their addresses in Keynote. ScrubDrop rebuilds the file from the parts and markup it recognises: anything in the file it does not recognise is taken out, or, where it cannot tell whether markup may be dropped, it refuses the file rather than guess. A password-protected .pptx is refused with a message, because the file is encrypted; export a copy without a password to check it. Keynote's own .key files are not supported. The cleaned file is read again with separate parsers before it is offered.

Questions

Sources: the Apple and Microsoft pages linked on this page were checked on 27 October 2026. ScrubDrop is not affiliated with Apple or Microsoft.