Use iCloud with Keynote

iCloud stores your presentations and keeps them up to date across your iOS devices, the web, and your computers. You always have the most current versions at hand, no matter which device you used to make your latest edits. With OS X Yosemite, you use iCloud Drive to access your presentations in iCloud.

If you’re using older versions of Keynote and OS X on other computers, or haven’t upgraded your iOS device to iOS 8, syncing won’t work in all cases. You must use iCloud Drive for seamless sharing and syncing of presentations. See this Apple Support article for more information.

Set up Keynote to use iCloud

  1. Open System Preferences on your Mac, then click iCloud.

  2. Sign in using your Apple ID, or request a new Apple ID and then sign in.

  3. Select the iCloud Drive checkbox, then click Options.

  4. Select the Keynote checkbox, then click Done.

Tips for managing presentations across devices

Here are a few things to keep in mind about using iCloud to manage your presentations across devices:

  • If you edit and then close a presentation when you’re not connected to the Internet, you see “Syncing” below the presentation thumbnail in the Open dialog on your Mac. The next time you connect to the Internet, the edited presentation is saved to iCloud.

  • If you edit a presentation on more than one computer or device before your edits are saved, you will see conflicts. Make sure the app has had time to save your changes to iCloud before editing the same presentation on another device. If you do get a conflict, you can choose to preserve any or all of the presentations you edited.

  • Before you can share a presentation in iCloud, you need to save or move the presentation to iCloud.

  • If you delete a presentation, it’s deleted from iCloud and from Keynote on all your devices.

  • If you use folders to organize your presentations, the same folder organization applies on all your devices.

  • If you add a password to a presentation on one device, the password is required to open the presentation on all your devices.

In addition to Keynote on your Mac, iPad, and iPhone or iPod touch, you can use Keynote for iCloud beta on the web. Keynote for iCloud beta is a web app you can use to create and edit Keynote presentations using a supported web browser on a Mac or Windows computer. You can access it by logging in to your account on iCloud.com.

Presentations you create using Keynote for iCloud beta are automatically available in Keynote on your Mac or iOS devices that are set up to use iCloud—and vice versa. If you create a presentation using Keynote on an iOS device or a Mac, the presentation appears automatically on the web in Keynote for iCloud beta. See Keynote for iCloud beta Help for more information.

To use Keynote for iCloud beta, you need to upgrade your iCloud account to use iCloud Drive.