How to export Figma Slides to Keynote using Pitchdeck

Video Transcript

Today, I’m going to be showing you a quick tutorial on how to export your designs from Figma Slides to Keynote using the Pitchdeck Figma plugin.

To get started, all we need to do is go to our Figma app and open up a brand new Figma design file. Instead of a Figma Slides file, which we’ll come back to in a second, you want to open up a brand new normal Figma file. Then, go to the “Resources” icon and search for Pitchdeck. Under the “Plugins” tab, if you click on the Pitchdeck item, you can run the Figma plugin by either clicking on the “Run” button here or, I’d recommend clicking on the “Save” icon to add it to your bookmarks for easy access later.

I’ve already clicked on that little save icon, so I’m just going to go to my Figma design file canvas, right-click anywhere, go down to “Plugins,” then to “Saved plugins,” and click on the Pitchdeck item. That’s just going to run the Figma plugin we saved a second ago. Now that we’ve got that loaded up, we can go back to our Figma Slides file. I have a brand new Figma Slides file open without any design in it already. What I’m going to do is spin up a brand new template by clicking on the View template button for this one here. Then, I’m just going to click on the add all slides button, and that’s just going to add all of these slides to a brand new Figma Slides deck or template for me.

By default, it will display all the slides in this kind of list view. However, to make this a bit easier, we want to switch over to the grid view. In the top left of your Figma Slides panel, go ahead and click on the grid view icon. That’ll give you a quick overview of all your Figma Slides in one go. In this example, I’m just going to export a handful of these slides to show you how to export them to Keynote. I’m going to grab the top row, but you’re welcome to select your entire deck if you want to export all of your slides. I’m just going to select the first dozen or so, and with those highlighted, I’m going to right-click them and then click on the copy button. Just right-click and then click copy.

Now, we want to go back to our normal Figma design file. Just swap back over to the Figma file we created before, and we’re going to paste those into the design by right-clicking on the Figma design file canvas and clicking paste here. You can see that’s grabbed all of those slides from our Figma Slides file and pasted them into our regular Figma file here with all of those layers intact. Now that we’ve got those loaded up, you can refresh the frames in your Figma plugin. Just go ahead and click on that refresh frames button, or you can rerun the Figma plugin now that we have those frames in here.

The way that the Figma plugin works is it basically looks for any Figma frames on the current page and treats those as slides in the Figma plugin. Now that we’ve got all of those loaded up, we can export these Figma Slides to a Keynote file by going to the export button in the Pitchdeck Figma plugin. Click on this blue export button over here, and we want to change the export format drop-down to the presentation apps group. We want to select the Keynote option, so go ahead and click on Keynote, which has “pptx” file in brackets. That’s correct.

You can change any of these options down here. If you want to tweak some of these things, like adding Retina images, or turning compression on or off, things like that, and adding editable texts, which is enabled by default, you can change those however you like. Now that I’ve got all my settings toggled, I can click on the export for Keynote button. I’m just going to click on that now, and that’s going to automatically export all of my Figma Slides that we just imported into a Keynote “pptx” file.

Now that I’ve just finished exporting that, I’m going to click on download your “pptx” file and save that directly to my computer. That’s just going to save it to my desktop. I’m going to click on Save, and then what you want to do is go to the file, right-click it, go down to open with, and click on the Keynote option. Just go ahead and click on Keynote, and that’s going to open up the “pptx” file with the Keynote app if you’re on Mac. You can see here it’s just opened up the Keynote app, and we’ve got all of our slides looking really good.

All of the slides that we designed or had from the template in Figma Slides are visible. We can switch to the list view to make that look a little bit easier. If we go to Keynote, you can see those basically match up as you’d expect. These are basically one-for-one with the original Figma design, but we’re now editing these natively in the Apple Keynote presentation app. This is really handy if you need to send a design created in Figma Slides to someone who’s using Keynote. If they want to make copy changes or text changes in the Keynote app instead, they can definitely do that.

You can move elements around, so if you need to rearrange things, you can totally do that as you’d expect. This is basically giving you a really quick export from Figma Slides to a native Keynote file or Keynote presentation that you can tweak or present using the Apple Keynote app. That’s it! I just wanted to give you a quick tutorial on how to export your designs from Figma Slides to Keynote. This deck here takes those Figma Slides and exports them through the Pitchdeck Figma plugin to be used natively in the Apple Keynote app.

We’ll leave it there for today, keeping it really nice and simple. As always, thank you for watching, and we’ll be back with more Figma tutorials like this one very soon.